Iconic

Getting your hands on an iconic and beloved entertainment property is surely a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you get the opportunity to mine the history of the franchise and its stories for your own gain, and get to leverage the interest of a dedicated congregation of existing fans. On the other hand… there’s a lot of expectation. People know this franchise. They know this character like a friend. They know how they want it.

This challenge isn’t just present in gameplay and the casting of Bond, but everywhere around the edges. There’s a ‘Bondian’ energy that absolutely must run through this game like lettering through a stick of seaside rock – and one of the departments most under the gun is surely IO Interactive’s audio department, who have to make sure gadgets and guns sound right but also manage one of the most iconic aspects of a 007 adventure: the soundtrack.

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“60 years of Bond, there’s a lot of sonic iconography,” admits Dominic Vega, the audio and missions director on 007: First Light. We’re chatting briefly as part of an overarching tour of IO Interactive’s Copenhagen headquarters where I got to see a chunk of Bond’s latest adventure and chat to some of the developers bringing it to life. Much as with the rest of the game, the musical challenge is summarized in its fresh-faced, young version of MI6’s most famous agent. This is a young Bond, and he isn’t yet fully-formed as the super-spy we know. At the same time, an expectation is there: fans want to hear certain sounds and themes.

Or, to put it another way, this Bond has to “earn his themes,” Vega says. “Throughout the campaign he grows, and he’s earning his number – and he’s earning his themes.”

The result is a soundtrack and audio landscape with ambition, and in turn quite unlike anything that IO Interactive has produced before. The moody rumble of Hitman wouldn’t be appropriate here, and nor would the atmospheric face-slap of Kane & Lynch 2’s score. Something different is required – and on top of all that, the studio wants to create a soundtrack that is distinctly Bond but also differentiated from the audio signature of the cinematic Bonds.

For that task Vega’s team has turned to the British composer duo of Joe Henson and Alexis Smith – aka The Flight. This duo has quite a list of credits to their name, including a range of big-name game soundtracks. Specifically, you’ve probably heard their work in Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, Alien Isolation, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Odyssey.

“They’re a really great composer duo with some amazing credits and some amazing music,” says Vega. “They’re a perfect blend of the sort of orchestral mastery that is required for Bond while contributing something modern, something that players I think will attach on to as a fantastic foot forward for the 007 franchise.

“Their sound is somewhere between the orchestra and the synthetics, and so I think they signify as a group and a duo what we’re looking for in bringing a younger Bond who is discovering this world of MI6, this world of spycraft, espionage, and intrigue – and bringing all that to life.”

Audio is as important to Bond as visual. | Image credit: IO Interactive / MGM

Across a few demos, one certainly gets the idea of the gamut of potential soundtrack options. Car chases and gun fights are an example of when First Light takes on a more linear nature, bringing with it a score that is more cinematic by design. In open-ended areas, however, the game needs to be ready to react; its score needs to morph and shape itself to game design that is open-ended enough that you might transition from schmoozing at a party to a brutal hand-to-hand combat scenario in seconds.

That’s a challenge not just for The Flight as composers, but also for the technical team at IO Interactive building the game. Dynamic music is now the norm in games, but the nature of the Bond franchise and its strong melodic identity means its dynamic music arguably needs to be more carefully stitched together, as Vega explains.

“The game is a lot about creative choice, and taking on opportunities in whatever way the player sees fit – and the music should cater to that perfectly, the audio director notes.

“Melody is incredibly hard to get right inside of games because of the interactivity of games, and in First Light we’ve insisted on completing our musical ideas. No matter if the player goes from combat to still really quickly, we need to get that musical motif to close. It’s really hard. And on a spreadsheet it doesn’t look great,” he adds, laughing. “But we find it’s really important.”

This ties into a lot of work done elsewhere to take IO’s technology as part of its Glacier engine and make it conform to the shape required for a Bond game.

“Typical combat music and design wasn’t going to cut it for us,” Vega says. “Music in the Bond universe is angular. It’s mixed meter. It’s off-time. It has space, it has oxygen. It has room for dialogue, and room for impact. We want to embrace that. We’ve refactored a lot of our technology to make sure that not only is it about the melodies, the motifs, and the feeling of being Bond – it’s also about how we assemble that for the player.”

You can expect as much nuance in the music as you’d get in a cinematic Bond effort. | Image credit: IO Interactive / MGM

Fans can expect plenty of classic Bond theme moments reflected in what Vega gleefully calls ‘needle drop’ moments – but the team has also been careful not to overdo it. There’s plenty of original themes, and within that philosophy of Bond ‘earning’ his iconic themes, it’ll only be when he really deserves it that one of John Barry’s most beloved melodies will cut through. The soundscape will also reflect Bond’s globetrotting – you’ll hear in-universe music appropriate to wherever he finds himself, including licensed tracks. Dialogue will also reflect where you are in terms of the use of language and the accents you’ll hear.

There are elements of the Bond sound that are indelible, however. The franchise has its roots in 1963’s film scoring, and in the big band swing vibes of Monty Norman’s seminal ‘James Bond Theme’, which in turn gave the legendary John Barry the template from which he created a truly unforgettable sound. That sound has to be present, Vega says, for both old fans and newcomers alike.

“We’re really proud of where we’ve taken it, but it’s something that… all roads point to Bond, to that iconic sound.

“We have an orchestral sound to our game, but this is a young Bond. This is a Bond that we’re trying to find the orchestra through the soundtrack. We want to be a Bond for a new gaming generation, and we want to present a fresh sound while never forgetting that this is a classic IP that the fans of Bond should feel really satisfied and welcomed in, but also that the new players can be introduced to this sonic iconography that kind of coincides with the the character’s experience.”

There’s an electronic element to the soundtrack that reflects the present day, but there’s a strong belief from Vega that the Bond experience isn’t one that’s synthesized – and the soundtrack needs to represent that.

Music affects the overall mood. | Image credit: IO Interactive / MGM

“We’re proud to present a musical genre that is increasingly disappearing from media,” he asserts. “I think that’s something that we take really seriously. I think six French Horns in a hall sounds amazing, and I want to make sure that players have that.

“Some of the best soundtracks I can think of, and if I was to ask a room of hardcore gamers what is your best soundtrack… almost all of them were from composers and people who wanted to show the audience music that is music, right?”

“But then lastly – gamers deserve to hear a swing band. I think a big brass group is awesome, it’s not something you hear every day, and I think when you’re playing Bond, you want it.”

It’s an ambitious musical project – which only makes sense for any composer following in the footsteps of the likes of John Barry and David Arnold, among others. But in all this music talk, there is one other Bond staple missing: what about a theme song? That question provokes the classic ‘not yet’ reaction. You can imagine it, I’m sure. PRs stiffen, and a bit of an awkward shuffle ripples through the room.

“We have some great music announcements to make along the road,” Vega tactfully offers. “We are obviously going for the complete Bond experience.”

This preview is based on a visit to IO Interactive’s HQ in Copenhagen. IOI provided travel and accommodation. I wrote this while listening to this excellent mixtape, for what it’s worth.

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