Last time - Halo Wars 2 - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=142995
This time - “I'm worthless. You should leave me here with the rest of the garbage.”
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Microsoft and 343 Studios finally got the message after the mixed reception to Halo 5: Guardians and advertised that the next entry in the franchise would shift away from the annoying Forerunner enemies and alternate playable characters and return to its roots of the Master Chief fighting Elites, Grunts, and Brutes amidst strange alien artifacts. This seemed like a great opportunity for composer Kazuma Jinnouchi as some of his best work for the series had been his interpretations of the themes from the Bungie days. A trailer for the sixth main game in the series shown at the June 2018 E3 gaming conference even used his music which included a new arrangement of O’Donnell’s victorious theme from Halo 3. But only a month later he left Microsoft. He claimed he wanted to try new things, but it’s hard not to wonder if the studio decided it wanted to go in a different direction, especially with the game having such a troubled development process over the next three years - two-thirds of the planned game getting cut in 2019, COVID, a disastrous 2020 gameplay demo where “Craig” become an internet meme, an original Halo writer getting pulled in to rework the campaign story in August 2020, and a studio head getting deposed a year before launch.
The resulting music team would end up being a three-headed monster. Gareth Coker, a known commodity for game scores like Ori and the Blind Forest and ARK: Survival Evolved, was first announced in June 2020; the latter game score with its “percussion and rhythmic elements” is what he felt got him the job. The next month Microsoft confirmed the involvement of Curtis Schweitzer, a comparative unknown who’d composed for various shorts, TV shows, and games before this; he may have been on the project the earliest since he wrote music for the trailer shown at the June 2019 E3 event which included some legacy theme references. Joel Corelitz, who’d done music and sound design on various games including additional contributions to 2018’s Death Stranding, was revealed as the third composer in August 2020. All three may very well have finished composing and recording their scores when these announcements came out as the game was still set to debut during the 2020 holiday season at the time before Microsoft decided sometime in summer 2020 to push it to December 2021 (Corelitz talked in early 2022 about finishing “ages ago and we just had to sit on it for a while”).
If the game was a course correction, then the music had to be as well. Coker later mused about how it was the first time he’d really had to conform to someone else’s style and pointed out that one of the interesting things about O’Donnell’s scores was how they made use of space and didn’t act like they had to “try too hard” in contrast to the busy nature of other video game music (a criticism which arguably extends to Davidge’s Halo 4 material). As a result, a good chunk of the music had the composers doing their own spin on legacy ideas, but with some freshness in the mix instead of the lifeless repetition of the anniversary re-recordings - a new clanging percussion hit there, a distinct melodic variation there, a bunch of new instrumental and synthetic colors everywhere. An amusing fact is that this wasn’t the original plan as Schweitzer said the initial instruction was “just do what you do” rather than play the hits, so to speak (he also acknowledged his first drafts were “an overwritten mess”). That’s not to say the music heard standalone is a 2.5-hour tribute album; Coker contributed a jagged, brutish theme for the Brute alien Escharum who leads the Banished forces on the Halo ring (the army resurfacing after being introduced in Halo Wars 2) as well as an otherworldly vocal idea for the secondary Harbinger villain, and each idea was adapted further by both Schweitzer and Corelitz. It’s plausible Schweitzer contributed themes for Master Chief’s new AI companion and the human pilot he links up with, but those aren’t readily transparent.
Halo Infinite was more of an open-world concept than its largely linear predecessors and necessitated a ton of music as a result. In addition to the aforementioned 2CD album program clocking in at well over two hours (the longest score release of the franchise to date), another EP was released including Coker’s juxtaposition of his Banished theme and legacy ideas for the music heard at the end of the 2020 gameplay demo; across both releases 66 minutes were Coker’s, 52 minutes were Schweitzer’s, and 29 minutes were Corelitz’s. Outside of his enemy themes, Coker’s material includes a lot of rhythmic string action that seems to subtly deconstruct the original Halo theme action variant, funny enough sounding like a precursor to his later music for ARK: The Animated Series (the TV adaptation of the game franchise that got him the Halo job). A good chunk of Schweitzer’s material plays up a sense of choral wonder, including several passages done acapella, though he also fares well in a few moments of action like the early Gbraakon Escape which blends Coker’s Escharum theme with legacy Halo action rhythms. Corelitz’s contributions are generally more reliant on synths and samples that give off a sense of the bubbly and dreamy stretches of the prior game scores in the series. Unlike earlier cases of joint composers in the 343 era, all three efforts fit rather seamlessly together; you could play the entire album and not even know it was done independently by different folks.
On the whole, Halo Infinite plays like a safe score (Coker’s personal favorite tracks were the few Harbinger-centric ones that deviated the furthest from established styles), but it was also a necessary back to basics pivot in the wake of 343’s stumbles in the 2010s. It showed you could push the franchise more into the orchestral realm without losing either its thematic core or its prog rock sensibilities, with the occasional use of a drum kit being a nice way to keep some linkage with the past. The campaign ending with a new determined variation on The Last Spartan from Halo 2 made for a terrific musical coda (a refined push of the nostalgia button, if you will). If - like I did - you treated this score more like a cover album back in 2021, give it another shot. It just might surprise you.
Halo Infinite campaign score - ****
- Original campaign album - https://open.spotify.com/album/4RrysJGiFbsvZi1KvRpzKl
- Me adding the unique EP track and one multiplayer track - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3tPdvzjHEgtWi46Bd5XrGd
- Coker only - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0szta1oHSSdNjXfPur0JdF
- Schweitzer only - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Rc4wwUnyoNOBS3rViz45e
- Corelitz only - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4wO9wlAeeswKQeRzi7Zho4
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Corelitz also teamed up with composer Alex Bhore and the group Eternal Time & Space to deliver music for the multiplayer portion of the game at its launch as well as subsequent “seasons” rolled out between 2021 and 2024. Outside of the first season’s album opener What Is A Spartan?, which riffs on O’Donnell’s Covenant and Halo 3 themes, the music falls into a kind of generic rock ambience. Multiplayer games have different needs than campaigns, so some of this is understandable, but one has to wonder what the market is for these albums as anyone who likes the multiplayer music probably got that way from playing the game a lot - and thus would probably just put the game on if they wanted to hear it!
2021 multiplayer season 1 album: ** - https://open.spotify.com/album/5nDHWO82TbGBbqbsPqKqec
2024 multiplayer seasons 2-5 album: *½ - https://open.spotify.com/album/7DYEZ9YgpiD9oBq0ZzDZFP
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And on AUGUST 1, 2025 (yes, really) we got another album associated with this game! Buried within one of the multiplayer maps in the game was an Easter egg: a Halo Infinite arcade that played 8-bit versions of both classic melodies from the franchise as well as the new bad guy themes, courtesy of Joel Corelitz. The 10 minutes of tuneful bleeps and bloops included on the EP release makes for a fun little retro digestif to the whole Halo Infinite meal.
8-bit Beats for Saving the Universe - ***½ - https://open.spotify.com/album/3wNHlP1n2lOhD97xhJz0sX
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Next time: “As a courtesy to John, I’m not gonna crush your skull.”
