Behind the Music of Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

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People like to joke about the seemingly endless parade of World War II games these days, but it would be hard to deny that the last century's biggest conflict has inspired some of the greatest music to come out of games in the past decade. The stirring orchestral scores of franchises like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty have won numerous awards over the years, sold thousands of soundtracks, and one piece in particular was even licensed for use in a recent presidential campaign commercial shown on national television.

Though not as ubiquitous, the Brothers in Arms series has earned a place among such distinguished company from the very beginning, thanks to composer Stephen Harwood's terrific score for Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30. And for this month's release of the latest installment -- Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, due out for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC -- developer Gearbox Software has pulled out all the stops once again.

To Hell and back

While it's disappointing to learn that Harwood wasn't brought back for Hell's Highway, Gearbox felt that handling the music internally would allow it the most flexibility during development. "[Deciding whether to stay in-house] was something that we actually struggled with a little bit as a company," recalls Audio Director Ed Lima. "There's such an emphasis on cinematic storytelling in the Brothers in Arms games as it is, and [Hell's Highway] is going even further. The sheer amount of character stuff that we do is like nothing I've ever seen, so we found that we really had to come up with some sort of process by which we could easily iterate and test those ideas. Eventually, just out of necessity, the way to do that became to do it in-house."

Fortunately, Lima was well qualified to handle the music himself, having studied at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and worked as a professional musician since his late teens as well. While early in his career Lima had planned for a future in film composition, he found himself in the game industry almost by accident in 2000 and hasn't looked back since. To date, he has written music for games ranging from Empire Earth to Doom 3, and for the past two years he has been at Gearbox just outside of Dallas.

An early order of business for Lima on Hell's Highway was to study the music from the previous Brothers in Arms games as well as WWII film and TV scores such as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers" to get a solid feeling for what makes the genre tick. He also delved into the classical canon including impressionistic music by Ravel, the 20th century clustered harmony of Ligeti and the pure Americana of Copland.

"As a composer, you do all that research and then you pull the lever and eject all that stuff out of your intellect -- but it stays wired in your brain and in the blood somewhere," says Lima. "Throw in a little sleep deprivation to get the nerves out of the way and then attack the project, and something true will come out because you've listened to the right things, you've informed yourself of the right things, you've been thinking about your script, and you've been thinking about your characters. All of that's going to turn into this soup that, hopefully when you overturn it, is true. I think we hit it; I think [the soundtrack] turned out okay in that respect."