In 2006, I joined EA's Redwood Shores studio (eventually to be renamed Visceral Games) to take over as Audio Director on the Godfather franchise.
The Godfather: The Game had already come out on PlayStation 2, XBox, and PC, and the up-port to XBox 360 had just completed. While my role was intended to focus on the sequel, first we had to get versions of the original game out for the just-introduced PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii platforms.
This was a unique challenge, as the studio had never shipped anything on those platforms -- nor had I!
Plus, I was jumping into a proprietary engine and tool set I'd never seen, and a sprawling, open-world game I'd never been inside before. We had a scant few months to get the ports out the door, including some new exclusive content on each platform. Got it done!
Remarkably, the Wii was the best-reviewed version of that game.
The Godfather II is an urban open-world game. The music presentation would include jukeboxes, car radios, and street performers. But we also wanted it to feel fully scored in a more traditional "cinematic" style.
To accomplish this, I designed and coded a new adaptive music system. This was a full-featured system which would later be incorporated into Dante's Inferno and Dead Space 3, and eventually standardized as Visceral's in-house music system (before the studio's transition to the Frostbite engine).
Even at this stage, it featured marker-based transitions, logic branching, latency-free transition covers, pre-roll, a highly abstracted and parameterized data definition, lightweight communications overhead, and optimized performance.
This system was then set up to work in conjunction with the "diagetic" music systems that I created -- the car radio and in-world music -- and a very involved prioritization mechanism was established to hand off between them at runtime based on the game state.
The Godfather II Dev Diary: Original Score
We spent four days at Skywalker Sound recording Christopher Lennertz's score, and then pulled it apart and put it back together for the adaptive system.
For example, here are some short excerpts from cues in the Queens NY section of the game. I created these by editing and remixing Lennertz's incredibly flexible, purpose-built composition:
Scenes from Skywalker
The Godfather II had plenty of issues for sure, but still, I don't think it was fairly treated by the press. And it wasn't a success in the marketplace.
Given the rather lukewarm reception, I came to love this quote from Kotaku's otherwise unfavorable review:
"The game's original instrumental soundtrack, composed by Christopher Lennertz, is truly an achievement and period-perfect. It captures the lounge-era metamorphosis of big band instruments and real-cool beats. Artistically, it's the only thing pulling its weight in this game."
Also! We made an unplanned TV ad for the game over the course of a weekend, the game's video editor and I the only production staff. It ran fairly heavily during the NCAA Basketball tournament.
"It's a Man's Man's Man's World" was a song we'd licensed for the game, so we got the extended license for broadcast and went to it. (It's a wild song to edit: tempo and timing vary radically throughout. Funky! Soulful!)
The ad wasn't all that good and obviously didn't help sales, but it was quite the experience to make.
The Godfather II TV Ad
Better (at least in a production-values sense), was the "Blackhand™ Brutality" online trailer we made for the game. "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" was another licensed song and I think I pulled off a pretty good edit here (it starts about 1:00 minute in). It's a little on-the-nose, yes...but it worked well for what it was.
Warning, this is extremely violent and full of NSFW language and imagery.
The Godfather II Blackhand™ Trailer