Even if you don’t know the name Jesper Kyd, it’s more than likely you’ve heard his music. The Danish composer and sound designer has worked on the soundtracks to dozens of games over the past three decades, including huge franchises like Borderlands, State of Decay, and Assassin’s Creed. Indeed, the signature tune of the latter series, Ezio’s Family, was his work.
But one of his oldest working relationships is with IO Interactive: he composed the soundtrack for the first Hitman game back in 2000, and he has since worked on many other IOI titles, like Kane & Lynch and Freedom Fighters. Not 007 First Light, though. He’s not sure that the thought appeals.
“I get very excited about trying to invent something new,” he explains. “So I’m not saying I would never write a Bond score, but I’m saying what really excites me is to write something new, where I get to write my own themes. That’s what I made a career out of: writing my own original melodies.”
Innovation is what really gets his juices flowing. It all goes back to his involvement in the demo scene as a teenager, trying to outdo his peers by pushing the Commodore 64 and later the Amiga to their limits. “It was very competitive, but in the best of ways,” he says. “It was always about trying to show off what you could do. Somebody would put five sprites on the screen that could rotate, and then somebody’s like, ‘I’ve done six’.”
That experience went deep into his psyche. “It’s shaped how I see things and in my head: things should always innovate. Things should always do something new and fresh.”
Of course, he accepts that’s not always possible for practical reasons. “Sometimes you need a sequel that does things more of the same, and not try to redo everything, and take things away that people love.” Imagine the outcry if a James Bond game dared to launch without Monty Norman’s iconic theme tune. “Also, the financial model doesn’t work for every single thing that comes out to be innovative. You also need sequels, you also need tested and tried things to make the economy work.”
There’s been a lot of talk in the games industry recently about how to reduce ballooning budgets, especially in AAA, so we’re interested in whether Kyd has felt any impact. “It hasn’t affected me,” he says. “For me, it’s kind of the opposite: I feel like we are writing more and more music, and that usually a score is minimum three hours now, and it can balloon to more.
“I also feel like the production quality is really important, and people seem to understand very well that production quality means we got to record live… Music can add so much to a project if it’s implemented and written with the right instincts and the right approach. It can just add an enormous amount of atmosphere to a game or a film. I think people are becoming more and more aware of that, and so I don’t feel they’re pulling back.”
Steady evolution
Kyd is at his happiest when he’s moving forward, evolving his style, learning something new. And never stopping. We’re speaking at Nordic Game, and he says if he wasn’t here, he’d be making music. “Every single day I make music.”
He’s always searching for the next challenging project. “For me, learning is everything. Again, that’s the demo scene spirit. You have to keep pushing. And so that’s what I do. I push myself constantly to do something I haven’t done before. And then I pick up so many new things: like when I did the soundtrack for Samson, which just came out, I’d never done a trip hop inspired score, but the game takes place in the 1990s, so the trip-hop-inspired thing made complete sense to us. And so now I know how to do trip hop.”
He doesn’t always get the opportunity. “Sometimes you get involved with a project with a tight deadline, and so the experimentation phase is a little more limited. But I love when I have time to experiment, and time to fail, so we can figure some stuff out. And failing is just as important as winning in the very beginning of a project, because you need to find out what is the right path forward – and you can only do that sometimes by failing. So I look at it like failing forward. It’s a good thing.”
Nowadays, he’s grateful that he tends to be brought on board “really early” in game’s development, which hasn’t always been the case in the past. But coming in early also creates its own challenges, he says, “because then you don’t have a game to look at, or the game doesn’t look good.”
In that case, he relies on concept art. “That, for me, can be incredibly inspiring,” he says. “I love concept art.”
“One of the challenging things of working in video games is you don’t always get to work with the creative director”
Kyd isn’t shy in sharing his opinions on what a game should sound like. “If you were presenting an idea to me and I think I have a better idea, I’m definitely going to tell you my idea,” he says. “I’m not going to hold back, I never hold back. But if your idea is better than my idea, then I’m all in.” He says he likes to be given an open brief. “That’s what you want when you hire a composer, or when you hire someone like me, who is more trying to experiment and come up with something unusual.”
But he also likes to collaborate closely with the game’s creative lead – something that isn’t always possible. “One of the challenging things of working in video games is you don’t always get to work with the creative director, because the creative director is usually incredibly busy- and when the music is starting to be implemented in the game, it’s sometimes crunch time too.”
Games versus films
This is one of the areas where games differ from films. When working on the latter, he gets to work with the director “most of the time, if not all the time, and you get a straight path to the lore of the project, the founder of the vision. You don’t always get that in video games, because you’re often working with an audio director, and if you have a really out-there question, that question needs to be sent to the creative director. And so you might not always have a free flow back and forth.”
That close interaction with the creative lead is something he particularly enjoys about working in films – his previous film projects include the Chinese action movie Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe and the folk horror flick Tumbbad. He points out that whereas a game’s creative director is pulled in many different directions near launch, a film’s director has plenty of time to devote to the musical score in post production.
Kyd says that the world-building skills he has learnt in making game music translate well to film, but very little else can be brought across. In film, he says, “you have to be able to jump between moods and scenes really fast and really seamlessly. You might hit three or four moods in 10 seconds in a film, and you have to be able to do that fluently. In games, we tend to stay in one mood for longer.
“You don’t want a main theme just repeated throughout the game – it would drive you nuts”
“I can do a four-minute exploration cue, and if there’s a battle coming up, then we have a two-minute battle cue, and if there’s a really intense battle, then we have an intense battle cue. If you go back into sneaking around, then we have sneaking around music. It shifts between the music styles. But in film, you have to go all over the place at all times. It’s a whole other language.
“And character themes are incredibly important in film. You end up bringing themes back for different characters, and then rewriting the themes in many different ways… You have to be able to write a theme and then write five variations: a sad version, tense version, energetic version… That doesn’t always happen in games, because if a game is a hundred hours long, you don’t want a main theme just repeated throughout the game – it would drive you nuts. You want 20 themes, and then you maybe do some minor variations. But it’s not like a two-hour movie, where you can have a theme become the cornerstone of the whole soundtrack, and you just keep bringing it back.”
Highlights
Looking back over his long career, Kyd says his early work with IO Interactive was a highlight. “Working on Hitman back then was such a joy,” he says. “I felt like we were all surprised at how well that game did, and then I got to do Hitman Contracts, which was an all electronic score, which is great fun to do after doing an all symphonic score. And then on Blood Money, combining electronic and symphonic into this new, other thing.”
Assassin’s Creed was another bright spot. “It’s great fun to hear all the different takes on Ezio’s Family whenever a new Assassin’s Creed comes up,” he says.
In terms of the future, he thinks the interactive element of video game scoring is going to get better and better. “But I’m not necessarily all in with making things as interactive as possible,” he says. “I think it’s incredibly important to remember music should still sound like music.”
Dynamic music can throw up problems, he thinks. “It shouldn’t sound like modules of music, and you shouldn’t be able to hear when it’s changing and branching into different modules.” He’s also not a huge fan of the piecemeal nature of a dynamic soundtrack. “If it’s all just 30-second loops, it’s not the same as writing big, epic, beautiful, four-minute exploration tracks, which people can really end up getting into. Instead, it will become very systemic, and it will become more invisible, and you might not even notice the music anymore. I am not that type of composer.”
Understandably, he wants game music to take centre stage. “I want the music to contribute to the storytelling and the atmosphere of the game, because I think it can make things feel heavier and deeper, and you feel more when it’s really implemented, with the music helping the game shine – that we can improve on.”
