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GamesBeat: What are some of your favorite pieces from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance?Ĭhristopherson: I’m really happy with all the vocal tracks, only because they went through so many iterations. I like to kind of blend everything and make a hybrid score that’s not one type of style.
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I like to combine that with electronics or ethnic music. GamesBeat: What’s your preferred composing style?Ĭhristopherson: I definitely enjoy working with orchestras, like live orchestras, but I don’t work in a purely orchestral way. But, I’m not sure how I got that job without having done a score like that before. GamesBeat: Did you know Platinum was looking for a heavy metal score before you took the project?Ĭhristopherson: No, my agent submitted my music to them and they were well aware of my style. You can make over 100 different tracks out of the original composition just by rearranging how the stems flow together. Say I write one piece of music that’s 10 minutes long with several different stems.
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Stems come into play when you’re trying to make your music interactive. Most of the work after recording was just editing stems back and forth.Ĭhristopherson: A stem is a set of instruments, like guitars or an orchestra, separated out into different tracks so the composer can mute or amplify different elements to make new music if they wanted to. I ended up passing 700 gigs of files back and forth with Platinum’s musical director Naoto Tanaka because every track used multiple musical stems, all recorded in surround. The asset management of this project was also very intense. We’d record live guitars, play it for the client, then work from their feedback. But here, it was collaboration the whole way through. At the very final stage, when I’m done writing, I’ll turn over music to the client. It was definitely a unique experience compared to how I usually compose, which is usually very solitary. The process of just writing the songs took at least six months. After that, the music was remixed several times. GamesBeat: What was the most challenging aspect of working on Revengeance?Ĭhristopherson: Producing the 13 metal tracks was definitely an unusual experience compared to other projects I’ve worked on because there was a huge amount of back and forth with the client, and then we had to get live performers for all the songs.
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Mostly, I came up with ideas that weren’t very metal then mixed it with these ideas from Logan and people who knew much more about it than me. We wanted real heavy metal guitar riffs and drums to maintain an authentic vibe. I hired people like him, and we co-wrote the songs. So I enlisted the help of Logan Mader, the former guitarist for Machinehead.
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I’d done a few heavy metal pieces here and there, but I’d never done a full score. GamesBeat: Is heavy metal outside your comfort zone?Ĭhristopherson: It was definitely a stretch for me. I would always see how far I could push the futuristic, post-apocalyptic vibe while implementing the sound they wanted. I took that and suggested a lot of modern electronic elements to go along with it. They threw out a lot of older style heavy metal references like Metallica and other stuff from the ‘80s and ‘90s. GamesBeat: What was the direction Platinum had in mind for the Revengeance score?Ĭhristopherson: When I met with Platinum Games, they had the idea to use heavy metal music. I mainly had to work off concept art for the bosses as well as descriptions. But they did have some of the gameplay mechanics implemented like Raiden going around cutting things up. They did have some early builds, but they weren’t texturized. GamesBeat: What inspirational material did Platinum Games give you to work from?Ĭhristopherson: Platinum mainly had the concept art done. I got there pretty far into the development or at least half way through. Jamie Christopherson: I’ve been on Revengeance a little over a year. GamesBeat: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance had a very tumultuous development cycle. Most recently, he provided additional music for the NBC show Revolution and the score to Ubisoft’s free-to-play adventure Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. He loves compiling “hybrid” scores that sometimes take samples from ethnic world music and blends it with orchestral or synthy tones. Jamie Christopherson is a composer for films, television, and games.