Composers

Short profiles of people whose work defined how games sounded. These are editorial write-ups based on published interviews, credits and the shipped audio itself. None of them are written on behalf of the people described, and none of them should be read as official.

Alexander Brandon

An American composer and sound designer whose credits run from tracker-era shareware through to full studio productions. His best known work sits in the late nineties on PC: the Tyrian and Jazz Jackrabbit soundtracks for Epic, then Unreal in 1998 and Deus Ex in 2000, the latter two written with Michiel van den Bos. He later worked on the audio side at several studios, including work for Obsidian.

What makes the Deus Ex score worth studying is its restraint. The main themes are memorable, but most of the running time is texture that stays out of the way while the player reads a datacube or picks a lock, and then thickens the moment a conversation turns. The music is doing narrative work without asking for attention, which is harder than writing a good theme.

The Unreal score went the other way. Long ambient beds, very little melody, and a willingness to leave the player alone with room tone for minutes at a time. Both scores came out of the same tracker workflow, which says something about how far the format could stretch.

More profiles

This section grows as pieces are finished. If a composer you expected is missing, they have not been judged unimportant, the write-up simply is not ready yet.