My Top 5 Video Game Composers

    Music, the universal language. While people notice different things when they play video games, one of the first things to pop out to me is the music. It is one of the most effective ways to convey emotions. In fact, there are some games that rely almost completely on music to make the player more immersed. Music is not something to take for granted, so here is a list of my five favorite video game composers.

5. David Wise

    This man has a very large number of titles he's worked on, but the reason that he hits this list for me is the Donkey Kong Country series. The music in that series has always been fantastic, moody and catchy in all the right ways for the type of platformer that DKC was. I honestly haven't heard his work from a lot of his older games. From the SNES era and on though, I'm totally familiar. He also did Battletoads, Star Fox Adventures and Diddy Kong Racing which all have fantastic scores. Maybe it's just nostalgia speaking for me in the case of David Wise, but the DKC series stands to have some of the best music in gaming for me. I especially like the way he manages to intertwine a level of silliness into the music while maintaining a very exciting feeling that doesn’t pull you away from the experience, but rather brings you further into it. He even came back to the DKC series again to do Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (he was not involved in Donkey Kong Country Returns).

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4. Team Blizzard

©Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

    I'm sorry, but I couldn't just pick one specific composer for #4, because I just wouldn't be doing them all justice otherwise. These guys are the ones responsible for the music from Blizzard (I like to refer to these composers as ‘Team Blizzard’). This includes the Diablo series, Warcraft series and StarCraft series. Since I'm not too familiar with Diablo, I won't include that in my assessment here. While I’ll admit that StarCraft 1 felt a bit juvenile and too dependent on traditional sci-fi nods, the rest of the games they've done I find to have beautifully crafted music. There is nothing more challenging than creating tunes you know people will listen to for hours and hours. That's the way real-time strategy games work though. Each race or faction will cycle through a handful of tunes, and most players usually pick one race/faction as their mainstay. That being said, I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've heard the Orc, Undead and Zerg songs throughout my life. Each track is appropriately made to represent the theme of the race, while pulling you in in just the right ways. When I'm playing as the Zerg, the combination of the sounds and music help me FEEL like I want to act as a Zerg would. There are very specific sounds and styles that are used that make you feel like you are part of a hive mind, almost an insect-like monster race. That's something special. To top it off, they managed to take the music to a whole new level with Warcraft 3 and StarCraft 2, offering extremely epic and emotional pieces that really made the campaigns a lot more meaningful. Last, but not least, let's not forget about the brilliant work that has been put into World of Warcraft. They manage to pull a large variety of themes to fit all the different situations and areas of the game, and frankly speaking...the music in WoW does not get old. While I wouldn’t necessarily praise Heroes of the Storm, the very catchy and comfort of the music in Hearthstone certainly works as well. These guys deserve every bit of praise they can get.

NOTE: The main composers behind Blizzard’s music are: Russell Brower, Neal Acree, Clint Bajakian, Glenn Stafford, Jason Hayes and Derek Duke. With so many, that’s why I didn’t include a picture of each of them. My apologies.

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3. Martin O'Donnell

    Here is a gem. O'Donnell is the man behind the music for the Halo series. He is a perfect example of a person who successfully evolved with the industry. While Halo: Combat Evolved had good music, overall it still felt very much like a video game. What I mean is that it relied a lot on synthetic catchiness. Halo 2 pushed forward and used a lot more emotional pieces while keeping the overall feel of Halo: CE. O'Donnell then took the music of the series and totally redid it to incorporate an orchestral score for Halo 3. This jump sealed the deal for me, because Halo 3 has one of the most beautiful soundtracks I've ever heard in a game. An interesting note that made me happy is that he was also involved in the sound design for Riven, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite adventure games and top on the list of one of my favorite games I've ever played. O'Donnell had been with Bungie for a long time, and was also involved in Marathon, Myth, Septerra Core and Destiny. He knows exactly how to bring a cinematic mood to the video games he composes for, without making the experience feel like a movie. That takes a special sort of talent.

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2. Koji Kondo

    This was inevitable. Anybody who knows anything about me knows that it would be impossible for me to list composers I really like without listing at least ONE (exclusive) Nintendo composer. Kondo was an easy choice for me, mainly because he has consistently made fantastic music, and has also been involved with the series from the beginning. What series do I speak of? Why, The Legend of Zelda of course! While there are a handful of Zelda games that revolve around similar themes, what stands out most to me is his ability to grab the underlying theme and game play quirk of a Zelda game, and turn that one simple idea into a brand new set of music. The most notable games he's worked on that I personally think stand out are Majora's Mask, Wind Waker and Skyward Sword. All 3 of these games have totally different settings with totally different ‘gimmicks’, and he captures that feel beautifully with the music in the games. To make this decision even easier, I'd like to mention other titles that I LOVE the music in that he did as well: Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Star Fox, Star Fox 64, Super Mario 64, Super Mario World 2, Mario Party 2, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy, to name a few. He is definitely a keeper, and Nintendo better not get rid of him anytime soon, if ever. He’s been a very important composer for the company essentially since they started, and he’s a very creative composers to be able to keep his music fresh in such long running game series.

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1. Nobuo Uematsu

     This was the easiest choice for me. I spent my childhood enjoying the music from the games he's contributed too. I also feel like he has done the best job of evolving with the industry. He did a brilliant job composing using the limited resources that 8-bit audio presents, did the same with 16-bit, and eventually moved on to more complexity in 32-bit+. While his most notable mentions are the Final Fantasy series, some other games you may or may not know he did are Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and The Last Story. Interestingly the Final Fantasy games I personally thought had the (relatively speaking) worst music are the ones he hasn’t been involved in. Uematsu has always done a good job of creating tunes that can be fun, silly, catchy, emotional and everything in-between. He knows how to present variety. It takes a high level of skill and creativity to create music for an RPG. There are a variety of situation and generally a higher number of tracks to worry about. It makes it even more challenging that he’s almost exclusively composed music for RPGs for his whole career. To top it off, he even made a music group to remix a lot of the Final Fantasy series' music with a more modern touch (The Black Mages and more recently Earthbound Papas). Despite there being a ton of good composers (not just the ones I’ve mentioned in my list), Uematsu has been a very defining figure in the world of video games, and still is.

     Overall this was a very challenging list to create. Being a huge lover of music in video games, it was tough to narrow things down to the 5 I picked. Most of my other picks did not have enough of a portfolio to be able to hold a candle against the ones on this list. Others I merely needed to get rid of through rigorous sessions of listening to competing soundtracks. Nonetheless, most all video game composers should be respected for the work they do.

What video game composers do you like?

- Teepu (Bowser05)

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