Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
80 M PS E . O R G Eric Marks MPSE: Marty, you were not only the audio director of Halo: Combat Evolved, but also the composer for all of the music in this game. Where did you look for inspiration for the music for this game? And what were some of your musical goals? Marty O'Donnell, Audio Director: Well, by this point in my career, I already felt very comfortable with all sorts of styles of music. The three words that were given to me all the way back in 1999, when we did our first demo at Macworld with Steve Jobs, was the music needed to make the audience feel like this is epic, ancient and mysterious. I kept those three words in my mind as a composer from the very beginning. The monk chant, the Gregorian chant, is ancient. Epic are the drums, the percussion and the chugging cellos, and those screaming strings. That felt like an epic orchestra. The mysterious stuff is some of the other material around it, including the vocalization that happens—it sounds like a weird chant melody, which was actually me performing it. There's a lot of stuff that's me, believe it or not. Even the choral music that happens in this scene, that's me at two o'clock in the morning because I realized I needed one more monk-sounding choral piece. I just kept running back and forth from the record button into the audio room because I didn't have a microphone next to my console, and I just layered my voice like a hundred times. EM: Was there anything about the characters, the story, and the world of this game that inspired any of your musical choices? MO: Well, I was already working with Bungie, finishing up Myth II: Soulblighter. And I was also working on a Bungie game called Oni. Every game came in and it was like "Okay, THIS is the game that's the sci -fi universe that sounds epic, ancient, and mysterious." Believe it or not, Halo: Combat Evolved started as a strategy game. Over time as it was developing, we realized that the first-person perspective was better than third person, which was also better than a straight strategy game. We realized this personal story of this guy who originally was a super soldier or space marine who ended up becoming Master Chief. When Cortana came in as a character, I started to realize Cortana in Halo: Combat Evolved