From Call of Duty to Super Mario Bros, Grammy video game score award category is proof of composers’ influence
- A new Grammy category honouring video game soundtracks has finally given composers recognition for the impact of their work
- Composers explain how different writing scores for games such as Assassin’s Creed and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is to composing for film and television
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From The Legend of Zelda theme to the infectious Super Mario Bros score, sound and music are foundational to the gaming experience.
And now, in a move many consider long overdue, the Recording Academy for the first time has created a Grammy category specifically honouring a video game soundtrack, an acknowledgement of the major impact gaming and its music have made on pop culture.
Previously video games were included in the score soundtrack for visual media category, which included music for film and television. But many industry players saw that as comparing apples and oranges, and pushed for a stand-alone video game category.
“It still doesn’t seem quite real just yet,” says Richard Jacques, the British artist who wrote the Marvel score.
A classically trained musician who studied at the London Academy of Music, Jacques has been in the industry for almost three decades.
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In 2001, he scored his debut major orchestral project, the first video game score recorded at London’s iconic Abbey Road studios. But earning mainstream “recognition of the craft we put into our scores” has been slow, says Jacques.
He says the new Grammy category “is finally giving us the sort of gravitas that we’ve been searching for for so long”.
The global gaming industry could earn close to US$200 billion in 2022, according to a projection from the Global Games Market Report, and a recent Deloitte survey taken across the United States, Britain, Germany, Brazil and Japan, said that video games are the top source of entertainment for Generation Z.
Many young gamers cite music as integral to the experience, with one third of respondents saying they looked up game music online afterwards, and 29 per cent saying they often discovered new music while gaming.
“Gamers really listen … it’s a huge part of shaping their experience for that game,” says Grammy nominee Stephanie Economou, a Los Angeles-based composer who has also scored films and television shows.
“A lot of them cannot separate the music from a game – and that’s a really exciting opportunity for any composer coming in,” says the Assassin’s Creed composer.
The music has to react to what the player is doing. The main thing is about player choice. We could have so many outcomes of the game’s result or story
The new category “is an important step for people to recognise that video games have been in the zeitgeist for so long now”.
Economou says the transition to video games after years working in film and television “was a pretty steep learning curve”, given the non-linear nature of video games, as opposed to the fixed window that is a film or series.
“In video games, it’s kind of this living, breathing thing,” she says. “It’s constantly evolving and the music needs to be loopable, and have these layers on top of other layers that can be triggered at any moment.”
Jacques says a key part of the challenge – and the fun – is that “the music has to react to what the player is doing. The main thing is about player choice,” he says. “We could have so many outcomes of the game’s result or story.”
“Whether they’re in a combat situation, exploring or solving a puzzle, or whatever the nature of the game is, it’s our job as video game composers to make sure that that is a completely seamless interactive experience.”
Recognition of video game composition is a full-circle moment of sorts, given that plenty of Grammy-winning artists are themselves gamers.
In 2019 jazz musician Jon Batiste – who took home five Grammys last year – said that games have inspired him since he was young.
Games “subconsciously taught me about theme and development, how to create catchy themes that you want to hear over and over again”, he says. “Stories come flooding into people’s minds when they hear these songs.”
