Having previously scored the soundtrack to “Battlestations: Midway”, I was delighted to be asked to work on Battlestations: Pacific. With the original game, myself and the team at Eidos Hungary established some strong themes and powerful suspense and action cues for the overall sound of Battlestations, something that we were keen to build upon for the sequel.

Work began on the project in early 2008, and I was working closely with Zizics “Fanta” Laszlo and the team at Eidos Studios Hungary. I also brought in another member of my team as co-writer on the project, David Kates. We had previously worked together on the soundtrack to ‘Mass Effect’, alongside composers Jack Wall and Sam Hulick. I wanted to add another dimension to the project and David was a great addition to the team.

Fanta and I began to put together the music brief, and it was clear that both of us wanted the music to be more interactive, since the gameplay can change dramatically over a very short period of time. I had played the original Battlestations: Midway a lot, as I enjoy strategy games a great deal, and I was instantly a fan of the game. Both Fanta and I agreed that we wanted to retain some of the original themes from Battlestations: Midway, since some of the musical settings for both the US and Japanese campaigns had become an important part of the overall Battlestations experience. To achieve greater interactivity with the score we planned to utilize multiple music streams, allowing us to switch between layers at any given point. This gave us the flexibility to change from a very high intensity action cue to a low intensity cue in a short space of time, all completely seamlessly and in a musical way. The three main musical ‘states’ that we identified were Action, Tension and Calm. Action is the highest intensity level, when the player is in the middle of a large scale battle, Tension could fit a number of scenarios, such as when you first sight a fleet of enemy ships, and Calm is for more travelling and exploratory sections. We also planned to score the cinematic sequences once the cinematics department had finished working on the images.

The music brief went through about 5 revisions until myself and the team at Eidos Studios Hungary were happy that we had everything covered, and had identified the music that would be needed.

Both myself and David then worked hard on the composition of the music, from January to May 2008. It was clear from an early stage that the interactivity of the music was much improved and that we were on the right track to create a much tighter integrated score for Battlestations: Pacific. We also gave the US and Japanese music more noticeable differences than the original, utilizing specialist Japanese ethnic instruments, such as koto, shakuhachi, dizi, and taiko drum ensemble. The original themes had new life breathed into them, and the new material is perfect for the setting of Battlestations: Pacific.

Along with the development team, Fanta provided me with regular feedback, but in general we were in 100% agreement with each other, and it shows that the music brief was right from the beginning of the project.

After the main game music was composed, we worked on scoring the cut scenes and then moved toward the final mix of each music cue. At this stage I added some additional production, especially to the Action layers, to really give the player the feeling of being in an intense battle scenario.

I mixed and produced everything in my studio in London, using Logic and Pro Tools, and then shipped the files off to Fanta and the team at Eidos Hungary for implementation into the game. Needless to say, I am looking forward to playing the final game!

Music composed by Richard Jacques and David Kates.
Produced by Richard Jacques.