Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
82 M PS E . O R G Clean," two days prior. Everything else were samples. We had a lot of samples, it was a hybrid orchestra, and we just tried to make it sound as epic as possible. Once we had started down that road, and it seemed to be appealing to the fans, we knew that that's the direction we were going to keep going. Because I was the audio director, they pretty much let me do what I thought was best, which was great. I really appreciated that. EM: Let's start at the beginning of the video and play from there. So, there are plenty of interactive moments of the music, such as hearing a stinger when something happens in the game. And you're working on this from about 1999 to 2001. How challenging was this idea of interactive music at the time for you? MO: Well, what you're hearing, there's a music track that's got random loops in it. There is a stinger waiting to be played, depending on where you are. This is gameplay audio live happening right up until we've transitioned into the cutscene. If the player had decided to stay by the Warthog a little bit longer or jump over the barrier and start shooting aliens, events and cues would only happen when the player goes through what we call "trigger volumes." So, you trigger these things to happen because the player is making a certain amount of progress. And those trigger volumes also trigger the music so that the music now knows we're coming to the end. It knows we're about to hit the transition point, so it needs to hit the climax of the music of this section. The technology was getting better quickly. There were other companies, like LucasArts had a spectacularly cool music system. I started going to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 1996, I think. Over the course of that five-year period from then until Halo launched, I did a few games and the idea of being able to adapt music to what the players are doing in real time got more and more mature. So, by the time we got to "We had three days to do all the scoring, Foley, sound design and mix for all the cinematics in the game. We had three days, there's 33 cinematics. So we had to find a way to finish 11 a day." A view of the unique horizon in Halo: Combat Evolved.