God of War Composer Criticizes Video Game Sound Standards and Persuades Sony to Redesign Game Engine

While other companies simply told composer Bear McCreary to write music, Sony responded to his complaints and found a way to solve the issues.

Composer Bear McCreary, who has worked on soundtracks for various games such as Dark Void, SOCOM 4 U.S. Navy SEALs, and God of War, recently gave an interview on the Toilet Ov Hell YouTube channel. During the conversation, he shared his memories of working with Sony PlayStation.

Because Bear McCreary is a big fan of video games himself, he criticized established approaches to creating in-game audio when talking with Sony representatives. He criticized everything from the perspective of an ordinary gamer:

I came in there with a bunch of naive notions. As a gamer, I just walked into Sony and said, «Here is what I don’t like about video game music. Why is this?» And then I just started pouring out my naive thoughts as a gamer — I mean, I’ve been playing games my whole life….Why every time you die do you hear the same music, and when you come back you hear it again? It’s a punishment. That makes me not want to keep playing. It enhances the feeling of a «game» when the «Game Over» cue plays and then you start over…..Why do I hear the villain’s soundtrack before I even see him? And stuff like that.

Bear McCreary explained that when he said similar things at other gaming companies, they responded along the lines of «Shut up and write music.» Sony did the exact opposite by listening to the composer and then saying:

Well, I mean, to get around this [limitation], we’re going to have to write new audio software. Why don’t we try it?

Image source: Santa Monica Studio, Jetpack Interactive, PlayStation Publishing LLC

Before God of War, McCreary worked with Sony on SOCOM 4. Back then, they created a new audio engine together for PlayStation games. When working on God of War Ragnarok, the composer once again convinced the developers to work on the engine. He noticed that in the game, the music would stop abruptly after defeating an enemy, and he wanted it to play through to a logical conclusion and fade out smoothly:

When we started work on God of War Ragnarok, I was like, «Okay, I love that I hear Kratos’s theme when I fight villains, but when I defeat them, the musical theme cuts off, like it stops abruptly […] it just doesn’t sound like orchestral music.» And they said to me, «Yeah, yeah, that’s a problem. We need to write a new audio engine to fix that.» So they did, and we tweaked the audio engine again.

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