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

Ed Lima, the man behind the music

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."

"We basically presented around 45 or 50 specific little pieces of music that related to specific cut scenes or sections of cut scenes. Some of them were action pieces; some were very dark, morose pieces; some were flashbacks, recollections based on earlier parts of the story. We scored it very tightly to picture, so it's much more of a film scoring project. Because we were dealing exclusively with cut scenes and we knew what those looked like from early animatics, we were able to very tightly time our music to the picture."

Blood on the highway

One of the surprising design decisions of the Brothers in Arms series since the beginning is that it consciously avoids music during the actual gameplay, and instead only uses it for cut scenes, menus and the like. As such, Hell's Highway's score is a little under 45 minutes -- but what's there makes a large contribution to the experience while simultaneously avoiding the endlessly looping repetition of other games.

"There's a powerful dramatic impact to making the combat feel much more steely, grim and morose by not having [a soundtrack] that can romanticize that," Lima says. "The company made a pretty good decision to leave the music out when the characters are interacting, and they're being people again and not tools of bloodshed, which I think is a powerful statement and use of negative space. That's a neat thing for artists to think about."

While the second game in the series, Earned in Blood, focused on a different main character and therefore went in a new direction musically, Hell's Highway follows Sergeant Matt Baker once again as he leads his squad through Operation Market Garden, so fans of Road to Hill 30 can look forward to hearing some nods to that score. "It was imperative to reflect [the return of Baker] and treat Baker's team as a modulation and an evolution, because the character changes dramatically," says Lima.

"Baker's not the same guy from game one to game three now, and he's certainly not the same guy from the beginning of [Hell's Highway] to the end. The fun and challenge for me was to treat Baker's material in a malleable format so that it always sounds like him, but he might be more up or more down, more okay or more broken. Man, that's the stuff that you just eat up -- I just love the hell out of that kind of work."

In addition to the game's orchestral score, Lima also made use of a large choir this time -- a first for the series. "We use it sparingly, but I think to great effect," he says. "Without giving away too much about the story, there's a sort of a dichotomy to Baker -- I wouldn't say a split personality, but definitely an element where Baker is wrestling with two sides of himself."

Interestingly, piano plays an important role for the first time, too. "If the chorus represents one side of Baker, piano-featured music represents very much the other side of that coin," Lima notes. "Both feel familiar, but they have very different connotations. One side could feel very homey, and [the other] could feel very sinister and very unsettling, so we have these two primary new instruments mirroring the battle that Baker undergoes as a person in this game. We really tried to open up a lot in terms of instrumentation."

Calling in reinforcements

The main stage in Dvorak Hall ready for recording

With Lima's duties as Audio Director requiring his attention on other Gearbox projects in addition to writing music, he enlisted the aid of composer Duncan Watt to help with the orchestration and contribute additional music to Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway. But even so, Lima had a tremendous amount to do before flying to the Czech Republic late last year to record the score with roughly 76 members of the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and a 32-person choir.

"The month leading up to the recording time was just brutal," says Lima. " I worked the entire flight there, worked the two days we were in the hotel. And not really doing composition, just layout and score preparation to get it ready to be printed and performed."

The control room deep below the concert hall

But the result was worth it in the end when Lima and Watt finally made it to Europe for the session. "It was beautiful," Lima says. "Prague is a fantastic place, and [has] some of the finest musicians in the world, so it was a great experience." The city's rich architecture, which escaped the devastation many other European capitols suffered during WWII, made a big impression, but it was Dvorak Hall where the team spent most of their time recording.

"We [were in] this beautiful hall, the back wall of which is this fantastic gold and bronze pipe organ," describes Lima. " I think it was upwards of 30 different microphones throughout the hall to capture the listener experience over special sections. All that information got routed into a recording control room in the basement of the building, which is where we were by day. Through closed-circuit TV we were able to direct the orchestra and make requests of the conductor."

Fortunes of war

As Gearbox's most ambitious score to date, it should come as no surprise that there will be an official release of the Hell's Highway soundtrack both on CD in stores like Best Buy and also digitally through the likes of iTunes and Amazon later this month. Fans of the series can also expect to see digital re-releases of the newly remastered Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 and Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood soundtracks complete with previously unreleased music from both as well.

And what of Ed Lima now that the latest Brothers in Arms game is finished? After a well-earned vacation, it's back to work on Gearbox's future titles, Borderlands and Aliens: Colonial Marines.