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The original
Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction was something of a surprise hit when it was released back in 2005, but with its over-the-top action and clever mission system, which allowed for shifting alliances with the various in-game factions, the game quickly won over players and critics alike. And arguably one of the best parts of its slick presentation was the driving orchestral score written by Michael Giacchino and Chris Tilton.
Some three years later developer Pandemic is set to release
Mercenaries 2: World in Flames for the latest set of ever more powerful consoles, and Chris Tilton's brand-new score is already looking to be one of the highlights again. With a more than 80-piece orchestra recorded for the game, including acoustic guitar and South American percussion, the music is clearly ready to propel players through
Mercenaries 2's intense action.
Mercenary without a cause
A New Orleans native, Tilton earned his music degree in Philadelphia before moving to Los Angeles close to seven years ago. There he started working with composer Michael Giacchino as an assistant and additional orchestrator for projects like "The Incredibles," and he later had the opportunity to contribute music to other projects like TV show "Alias," as well.
But all the time he's been working in Hollywood, Tilton has been a hardcore gamer, too. He cut his teeth on the NES, got addicted to game music with
Final Fantasy II, and never looked back. He can just as easily debate the merits of current consoles as he can Legend of Zelda chapters, and you might want to think twice before challenging him to game of
Gears of War.
So it should come as no surprise that he has jumped at the chance to write music for a number of games himself over the past few years, including collaborating with Giacchino on
The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer and
Black, and more recently some solo projects. "The first
Mercenaries was the first large orchestral videogame score I'd ever written, so it was nice then to have Michael Giacchino's involvement," Tilton says. "I learned more from him than anyone else. After
Alias was done, we mutually decided it was time for me to go out and find my own voice, and writing
Mercenaries 2 played a large part in that process."
Show me the mercenary
Chris Tilton (in foreground) as the score is being mixed.
Tilton's first work on
Mercenaries 2 came in spring 2006 when developer Pandemic asked him to come up with some ideas for the sound of the game for their E3 unveiling, and later on they signed him to write the whole score. "I worked closely with [soundtrack supervisor] Viktor Phoenix at Pandemic from the process of figuring out what the score was going to sound like, to the music that needed to be written, all the way through the scoring and editing process," says Tilton.