The Utahns who level up video game music

SALT LAKE CITY — Video game music, long a poor stepchild of film scores, has been getting more recognition, some of it for a major studio game produced and scored here in Utah.

“That was my dream to do soundtracks and scores, and the film was the only option when I was growing up,” said Utah composer Chuck E. Myers. “I almost kind of had evolved to wrap my brain about the fact that video games is the new format for scores.”

Myers, who’s written music for everything from the NBC Olympics broadcast to the Oprah Winfrey Show, has written pieces for dozens of games, including the recent blockbuster release “Hogwarts Legacy,” produced by Warner Brothers and Utah’s Avalanche Software.

“I just think of myself as a stunt double,” he said. “This idea of reverse engineering other composers has allowed me to be a stunt double.”

His Hogwarts job was to emulate the music of famed composer John Williams, who scored the Harry Potter movies.

“We’re just, John Williams set the bar so high, we’re just gonna walk underneath it,” he expressed.

He also worked on “Toy Story,” which he composed in the style of Randy Newman.

Video game scores have been compared to film scores but can be more complex because the game’s plot can veer in so many different ways.

“Classical scoring of a film, you basically have a line. And then, in a video game, you almost have to think of it as a complete matrix. So that it’s not just one line, it’s a whole series of lines that can jump between each other,” Myers explained.

For Hogwarts, he spent five years producing 70 hours of music, about 30 of which ended up in the game. He produced an entire classical album for a piano that performs when the player casts a spell over it.

“I knew it would be maybe a little bigger than some of the games we’ve worked on, but I think the scale was probably five-x at least. That year was kinda crazy,” said audio engineer and musician Jake Bowen.

Bowen performed some of the music written for viola and thunder sheet, a large piece of suspended sheet metal that can produce deep, thunderous rolls and eerie, high-pitched dissonance when bowed.

“You’ve got everything from battle scenes with huge drums to maybe sad moments, soft strings, broad strokes. The full scale of what can be done in an orchestral piece,” he said.

Myers employed virtual, sample-based instruments as well as orchestral musicians and vocalists recorded in his Utah studio. Utah composers J. Scott Rakozy and Peter Murray also produced music for the game.

As is now what has become standard practice for many games, the music of Hogwarts was released on its own as a download. It was also released on vinyl, and those records sold out.

Game audio was just a blip when Pong arrived on the scene in 1972. The first melodic soundtrack didn’t arrive until eight years later. The eight-bit revolution ushered in catchy arcade jingles. The transition to CD-quality sound in the ’90s was a real game-changer. Video game scores started sounding more like film scores.

Over the past two decades, game scores have been playing symphony halls, thanks, in part, to the Video Games Live tour begun by composer Tommy Tallarico.

About a decade ago, the score for the game Journey, by composer Austin Wintory was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media, and this year game music got its own Grammy Award.

“The level of, the quality, is just getting so much better, and I think with my generation, where we’ve grown up with video games, this is just part of our culture. We just recognize these things as being so important in our lives,” Rakozy expressed.

It didn’t escape aspiring game composer Dorian Palmer’s notice that the first Grammy award, in what tends to be a male-dominated business, went to a woman — Stephanie Economou, for the soundtrack to “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.”

“It’s validating is what it is,” Palmer said.

Palmer, a recent BYU music school graduate, says her mother said, “No one knows who the game composers are, though. Why do you want to do that?”

Her mom then became a professional Twitch streamer.

“So, like, a year later, she was like, ‘Do you know that games need music?'” Palmer said.