Over the weekend, my friends took me to see a live performance of the soundtrack for Journey, where a group of players went through the game while composer Austin Wintory directed an orchestra alongside them. I’ve never been to a video game concert before, and now I want to know everything about how video game soundtracks are made.
Journey, you may remember, is an indie game that came out for PS3 in 2012 and made waves for its multiplayer element, where a stranger could show up in your game to accompany you across the sandy landscape. You were limited in how you could interact, and the whole experience was pretty revelatory for the time. The game ultimately came to PC in 2019, but when it first released I didn’t own a console, so my familiarity with it is mostly playing a bit of it at the house of the friends who took me to the concert. I hadn’t played any multiplayer games with strangers back then, so I remember the fascination and nerves that filled me when another player appeared in my game, and my curiosity and relief when we could only communicate through movement and musical chirps.
Wintory conducted the American Composers Orchestra, which prominently featured a very excellent cello soloist who made me miss playing the cello. The game showed on a giant screen behind them, while players seated to the side took turns trading off the controller. I split my time between watching the gameplay and staring at the orchestra, wondering what it was like to follow a score that had to line up to someone playing the game in real time. At one point, a player missed a jump, and the orchestra seamlessly looped the music to keep it in time. Sometimes the experience felt like watching a Let’s Play at home; at other times, it felt like watching a concert.
As the end credits rolled, the user names of several players appeared on the screen. My friends and I assumed they were real players who just happened to be online and matched up with the concert, which was kind of wild to contemplate. Who was playing Journey on a Saturday afternoon in 2024? Would they ever imagine that hundreds of people had watched them live, including the game’s composer?
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never thought super hard about how video game scores work on a compositional level. In many games, a player could spend unlimited time in an area, so how do you structure a score that doesn’t have a defined length like a song would? When you play Journey, the music responds to where you are, what you’re doing, and whether there’s another player. I’ve always just kind of thought “yeah, that’s a thing video game music does” and considered the technical aspect of how it’s implemented in a game, without ever thinking much about how someone writes a score that can do that. As Wintory told EGM in 2019:
The issue [with dynamic scores] is reconciling the player agency with some sort of musicality… Music is by definition a linear art form, playing out over time. Great music (and great performers) leverage that to take you on emotional adventures. When that passage of time is subject to tinkering, it can destroy the storytelling instantly. My goal is always to find a way to preserve the best of what traditionally linear music can offer (particularly with regards to storytelling) while giving the player maximum agency in the process.
Combining a performance of the soundtrack, which could easily just be static, with the elements of gameplay, which require responsiveness and change, was way cooler to witness than I expected it to be when my friends invited me. A video game music concert is definitely not something I would have gone to on my own, and I’m really glad I went.
I know at least some of you are video game music composers, so please fill the comments with notes about your creative process, which I will read and then respond to with phrases like “gosh!” and “wow!” because, outside of writing a few little songs on guitar, my only experience with arranging is from high school music theory, wherein I attempted to create a band version of the Counting Crows song “Raining in Baltimore” for an assignment, but failed utterly.
