I Audio Directed Blood Wake, a launch title for the original Xbox (it actually shipped in the second wave, but it had to be ready on launch day). It's a water-based action combat game with light story elements set in a highly fictionalized Asian-inspired environment.
Robb Mills and I divided composing duties, crafting the soundtrack to be driving and energetic, with a very early-2000's mélange of loops, guitars, and electronics -- and just a touch of non-specific, pan-Asian character.
Until very late in production, the music was intended to be implemented in an adaptive system: all of the cues were written in sections that could loop and branch, and built with layers that could be mixed in and out at runtime.
But launch titles on new consoles are subject to certain...technical constraints that subsequent releases might not be. We were developing on a non-final SDK (even non-final hardware, for that matter), and some late changes meant that we had to abandon the adaptive system at the last possible minute.
We quickly made linear edits and mixes of the cues that we thought would work well enough as old-school "level songs" and installed them with a semi-random track selection mechanism. It was a really unfortunate compromise, but sometimes that's how these things go.
Here are some excerpts from cues I wrote for the game. Note that Rendezvous was featured in the national TV advertisement for the game.
In any event, the music and sound for the game were generally well received, with a number of great reviews. GameSpot called the soundtrack "strong, with songs focusing on power chords, traditional Asian drums, or a mixture of both."
Sometimes the rigors game audio production can really get a guy down. For instance, to capture unique isolated water interaction sounds, we were forced to gather our location gear, charter a sailboat, and head out onto the bay (and under the bridge into the ocean a bit, too). Ugh, will the drudgery never end?
From left: Robb Mills with mic boom, "Captain Ben" at the helm, and me, Audio Directing the hell out of this session. Photo by Chris Hegstrom.
It never ceases to amaze me how some work that I've done lives a life of its own out in the world. Like the Game Developer articles and Conference talks, and the Pool of Radiance OST, it's delightful to find that someone has cared enough to engage with and memorialize this ancient material.
While assembling this page I came across a video review of Blood Wake on YouTube...from 2023(!!). This game is more than two decades old (it's older than YouTube!), and people are still making content with it. Kind of cool. Dude seems to dig the soundtrack, too:
The reviewer mentions first seeing this game when at a sleepover at a friend's house and his dad had it, for crying out loud.