It’s one of the crucial iconic musical themes in popular culture historical past: a plucky guitar riff that explodes right into a symphony of brass. You most likely understand it effectively, even should you’ve by no means seen a James Bond film or performed a 007 recreation. And now the enduring Bond theme is again within the highlight thanks in no small half to online game music veterans The Flight. I spoke with the duo, composed of bandmates Alexis Smith and Joe Henson, forward of the discharge of IO Interactive’s 007 First Light to speak concerning the challenges of constructing a brand new rating round such a basic theme and the shocking lack of guidelines they encountered whereas scoring the sport.
“The primary factor from IO Interactive was to carry again these [big orchestral] moments to offer it to the participant when he is earned it,” Henson says. “Apart from that, we weren’t being pushed into any containers. There undoubtedly wasn’t a mode information that got here in from outdoors saying, ‘That is how it is best to use this.’ Sonically, how we used that predominant theme, there weren’t actually any guidelines.”
“The sport is cut up into totally different places, and we gave every of those places a sound,” Smith says. “Bond is brass, Bond is strings. However we, being The Flight, are at all times attempting to push modernity as effectively as a result of it is a fashionable tackle Bond. So we have to make use of electronics, use synths and stuff like that in a tasteful method. I really feel that’s type of our specialty.”
The Flight, who’ve additionally scored video games like Gotham Knights, Murderer’s Creed Shadows, and Horizon Zero Daybreak, say they labored with 007 First Light theme tune creators Lana del Ray and David Arnold to make sure the tune’s melody would attain past the opening credit.
“We used Lana and David’s [song] at very particular emotional factors,” Smith says. The primary time you hear [that melody] may be very early on. It is type of Bond’s rebirth. It seems like he is lifeless. [But then] he’s reborn.”
“Then there are some factors a lot afterward within the recreation the place you hear it additionally,” Henson says. “When he does his first kill. After which on the finish, [but] we do not need to spoil an excessive amount of.”
The duo says they grew up watching Nineteen Eighties Bond movies starring Timothy Dalton, but it surely was a later movie that cemented their love of the franchise and all of its musical historical past.
“After I was 10, we have been watching Residing Daylights at Christmastime,” Smith says. “However [1995’s] GoldenEye [sung by Tina Turner] was at all times the tune that I latched onto. [It] got here out simply as I used to be coming into the music trade. It’s a giant tune that also sounds so good. It nonetheless sounds fashionable. You would play it in a brand new Bond movie and it might be completely nice.”
Regardless of scoring quite a few AAA video games, each Henson and Smith say composing music for 007 First Light offered some distinctive challenges.
“A recreation rating is for much longer an expertise than a whole lot of movies,” Smith says. “So that you want extra of all the things. It is very tough to string out simply the Bond theme all through all that music. It could get boring and also you undoubtedly do not need to overuse that Bond theme that everybody is aware of. At the very least half of the rating, if not 60%, is interactive music. It’s music that may transfer between states relying on what the participant’s doing. From sneaking round to large spectacle moments. Generally with [game] scoring, you’ve got simply bought to think about it after which write it.”
“We’ve accomplished a whole lot of open world video games, so [007 First Light] may be very totally different to that,” Henson says. “It was much more scripted and much more guided for us. It was a hybrid movie and recreation. [IO Interactive] has been speaking about how the sport works the place you’ve gotten playgrounds, then cinematic moments, and epic moments. And we wrote [the music] in mainly the identical method.”
“We did not prepare at a movie faculty or something like that,” Smith says. “We began as musicians making dance music, being in a band, making pop music. So we [came] into engaged on video games from that angle and realized the orchestral language alongside the way in which. So that is what we needed to maintain. We needed to maintain the place we have come from. [But] clearly we now have a giant accountability to the Bond rating. It’s at all times bought to sound like Bond.”
Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Occasions & Leisure at IGN, main leisure content material and protection of tentpole occasions together with IGN Dwell, San Diego Comedian Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He is spent 20 years working within the video games and leisure trade, and his adventures have taken him in every single place from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Comply with him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton