I don’t really expect people to tell me what to do my job is to go out and find answers. In order to give my very best, I give myself unlimited freedom and then, fingers crossed, hopefully the developer likes what I’m doing. But as long as you’re keeping your collaborators happy, it certainly appears to be so. How much freedom do you have creatively on a project like this? Are there very specific notes on what is needed for the game, or do you mostly get to create freely and adjust to their liking?ĪNDERSEN: I always like to believe that I have an unlimited amount of freedom, but ultimately, of course, that’s not true. We didn’t work directly on a piece of music together, but instead our music was inspired by what each other was doing. He and the team had solid ideas on what they’d like us each to focus on. GORDON: really directed us through that maze. However, as we got started and the music was implemented into the game, I began to get the feeling that our respective styles were actually complementing each other. As I consider both Mick and myself as each having a strong, unique voice in terms of aesthetics, initially I wondered if by splitting the work between us the score might end up being too variegated. While Mick largely had the resistance themes covered, my task was mainly to work with portraying the Nazis, including Frau Engel and their environments, such as Area 52 and the facility on Venus. When we got started on the project, around summer 2016, we got together with Nicholas Raynor in Uppsala and worked for about a week, going through the entire game in progress and roughly dividing the workload between the two of us. How did you two approach this particular score as separate composers working together with one goal? Did you have separate workloads or was it all collaborative?ĪNDERSEN: Most of the collaboration happened on a conceptual level, while in the actual compositional process we worked more individually. The best way to stay aware is to actually keep playing games yourself. As a composer, unless you’re aware of such pitfalls, you could be ruining the player experience. You have to know how it feels when you’re stuck in a game while a repetitive melody is driving you mad, or respawning again and again causing the same cue to play over and over. But I do believe that it’s crucial to play games in order to understand their nature.
But unfortunately these days it’s very rare that I have 20 hours available to complete a game. I love games, and I check out as many as I can. Would you consider yourselves to be avid gamers? And do you think being well-versed in video games would give you any advantage in composing the music for one?ĪNDERSEN: I wish I could call myself an avid gamer. We looked out across the San Francisco skyline and talked about war, oppression, diesel-powered robot-dogs and Nazis in the USA-the world of The New Colossus. GORDON: Martin, Nicholas Raynor and myself met in a top-floor hotel bar in San Francisco, the type of place where you sit on low chairs and they serve Scotch with a tiny straw and a slice of lime. So how did the two of you end up coming together to compose the score for Wolfenstein II? But, my big passion as a kid was music, and I guess as I got older, I looked for ways to combine these two interests. For me, these machines were gateways into other worlds, other universes. I lived in a small remote town in Central Queensland, and there was a pub with a few arcade machines. MICK GORDON: I was really into games as a kid. Before working on LIMBO, I had done a couple of experimental short films, and my experience with sound installation work meant that I already had an understanding of the nonlinear nature of games. What has interested me ever since working with visual media is the kind of magic that occurs when you combine sound and image-the way in which our perception will always try to glue the two together to form a single impression.
Along the way, I got more into cross disciplinary work, such as theater performance, installation and video art. Before that I had already been working as a composer for about a decade, mostly in the field of contemporary and electro-acoustic music. MARTIN STIG ANDERSEN: The first game I worked on was LIMBO. Before even getting to Wolfenstein, can you tell me a bit about how you originally got into composing music for video games and where that interest stemmed from?
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