Noodle Interviews @Martin O'Donnell - Composer and Audio Director for Halo & more!

you realize i'm going to talk to you i'm going to interview you as much as you interview me oh and here's why here's why i see you kids doing all your youtube stuff stuff and to be honest with you which i'm always honest with everybody um the thing that fascinates fascinates me about what i see from some of these from you guys on youtube yeah is your analysis of these games that we made so long ago uh and your analysis of the games from story plotting everything writing you know you name it all that stuff and i'm like okay well how are these kids getting so smart about all this stuff and here's what i don't want to see and i'm not kidding i don't want to see you guys get just stuck in this easy youtube business i want to see you guys start like you guys are smart enough you should be out there making like real games and like writing for games and coming up with your own stuff and like i want to see you should be the future gamer makers of america so whatever country you're in sure sure um no but i i really appreciate that thank you um and no i'm i'm happy to answer any questions but primarily um i just have there's a lot of stuff about this uh about the behind the scenes that i wanted to have some more insight on and so you especially i think could really shed a light on some of that so uh before that though let's just get a couple pleasantries out of the way um how have you been with uh with with covet especially um with the world crumbling around us how's that been for you it's boring it's as boring as boring as hell i mean it's just like i mean every day it feels like you know groundhog's day um like every night i go to sleep and i'm like really another day in the bag and like i stayed in my studio and my at least my wife is here so that's good but i mean like yesterday we went up over the mountains and drove into another place and had a nice day out but one thing that's good about it is i have decided to figure out what's going on with all of these online tools and all these online communities and like okay i'll do some interviews with people who you know are good at this so uh it's exposed i don't think i would have been um i wouldn't have jumped into the especially the halo community online interviews and all that stuff i probably wouldn't have done that if i kept going downtown every day to my studio down there so yeah i figured that has something to do with it it was it probably was a coincidence that these interviews started popping up a lot more as soon as coconuts exactly exactly um but speaking of uh speaking of going down to the studio um i'm interested as to how highway or as a company is also adjusted is there a lot more work at home stuff going on uh how was the how was the development cycle shifted because of this yeah a development i mean we're in a business where uh distributed working is already was a thing and we ever a lot of people were able to say hey i think i'm going to work at home today and you would say okay go ahead try not to make a habit out of it we had a couple of people who would be well you know i'll take the job but i need to be able to work at home twice a week and we're like okay that's good so we make sure everybody's set up and we work on slack and discord and right you know most of the time even when you're in the same studio together you're actually communicating in slack or you're communicating you know you're actually there was a guy this was like a couple years ago i was working and i did something in there really two people had the same first name and i was talking to this one guy that i in my head i thought was a different guy who was not in the studio and then i realized after a while like after like a half an hour of texting with this guy back and forth he was just sitting right across the desk for me he was like i'm like wait that's you or are we just talking and he says i i prefer text and i'm like yeah it's yes so anyway that was pretty funny so um for text [Applause] trust me a lot of these engineers especially very introverted yeah no i i know the type yeah so anyway my point is is that um technologically we were already set up to do this it wasn't that hard to you know everybody all the builds are on a server we suck it down using perforce and check stuff in check stuff out communicate have stand-ups that are all virtual and and uh with all the technology that's been getting better and better um it just hasn't been hard for us now how actually productive we are i think that's another question i don't know i'm less productive but that's not a big surprise i did don't expect much for me anymore but uh you know there are there are a couple artists that have told me like they're doing way better because they don't have to commute and they just feel like they're more relaxed at home in their own studios and so it's like okay we'll see when what i see us working on what i see is doing is it looks and plays really really well um it's exciting to hear so we'll see yeah hey hi hello i'm here to interrupt your viewing experience it's that time of year again where my bills are all due in an unrelated note honey is the free browser extension that i'd be genuinely amazed if you haven't heard about by now they all hear about finna get you a goddamn gift in the form of what they've dubbed the great honey gift away where they toss one million dollars into the bottomless pit of holiday consumerism thousands of gifts a week wow that is so cool honey don't only find promo codes it also has a drop listing where you add shit onto it from that one store you like and honey keeps an eye on the price in case it goes down isn't that isn't that so cool let's talk more about free things you slap honey onto any consenting pc over at joinhoney.com noodle add things you want to the aforementioned drop list and pray to whatever god you believe in that honey randomly and quirkly selects you i've been eyeing this for a long while definitely gonna dropless that when you are buying things buying them for less is good getting them for free during a big company's promotion also good supporting my channel by supporting the sponsor nab honey for free by at joinhoney.com alliedhotty.com noodle [Music] something uh something that i've noticed about a lot of interviews with you is that uh people tend to really fixate on the musical side of uh of your work uh regardless of what it may be um so you've said before that you never really considered yourself bungie's composer per se you were more just the audio director through and through uh yeah i mean a composer would make a composer makes it sound like i'm i get up in the morning i start writing music and i have lunch and then i write more music and then i you know knock off and go to sleep right as though i'm writing music all the time and frankly even in the full you know 10 year period of doing halo the percentage of time that i was writing music where i would say now i'm a composer i don't think it was probably more than 15 to 20 percent of my total time if that i mean when you when you think about all the other things you have to do um i i remember uh i remember hearing a rumor uh that after painting houses while uh in between working on ad jingles and transitioning to game audio uh you had to convince some people that audio director should should be a thing because because at the time it wasn't uh you're correct um can you can you tell me a little bit more about that um like yeah sure you know so uh sounds like you've done a little research which is great uh my father was a film director so i grew up on film sets my mother was a music teacher uh so i had i came by all of this very honestly but once i started working in the film and television business doing jingles or film scores i noticed that like there were directors like my dad and there were art directors like that he would hire right but there was no audio director and so on every single thing i worked on there was never an audio director the audio was always split up between several different kinds of people there was a composer maybe the composer audio engineer editor audio engineer re-recording mixer the re-recording mixer is the guy who sat at the at the final mixing console while the film is running anyway the guy who did that mixing or the engineer who did that mixing usually sat with the director or maybe the sound or the editor and they were the ones making all the decisions and if you were a composer or a sound designer you maybe were invited to the final mix and you could sit out in the in the little theater because it was this was back when they would do film mixes in what looked like a little theater right big screen and big speakers and every once in a while you could just sort of raise your hand like hello sir could i have some more like it seems like that music was a little soft and that's it shut up like so i mean as a as a composer or a sound designer you really had almost no input at all into the final mix it was this other person and they weren't they weren't audio directors they were this is their job was pretty much a technical job where they brought all the elements all the audio elements together and mixed them and uh as technology got better and better in the 80s and 90s uh where our little home our little small studios that we used to do demos in we were able to actually finish stuff then see you young kids you don't know what it's like back in the day um so i was like hey i would say to the clients you know we're doing we could do the final music right here in our studio and by the way you know we could do sound design and hey why don't we just you know we're mixing with the scratch voice over why don't we have the voiceover guy come in our studio and just have him do it and then we'll do the whole mix so suddenly we were doing everything in our studio because digitally we were able to do everything it got better and better and that was a big deal and yeah so then i started telling people in the film television business that like i was the audio director and they're like no no you're not there's no such thing you can't do that so so when i got when i got into the game business i saw that there were no rules about anything there was nobody had any titles nobody knew what they were doing so i would just go to meetings and say well i'm the audio director that's what i was excited i really wanted to be because the rumors that i heard uh really did make it sound like you just sort of bluffed and bluffed the existence of oh i love that yes and as a matter of fact i maintain to this day i look at you know ea has audio director positions right you know ubisoft has an audio director position and i'm like hey i'm the one who made that term up but uh it's possible i think i've said this before too it's possible that somebody else back in 96 or whatever made that made up the term audio director in the game business but i really think if you look into the history of it it didn't show up until i started throwing that term around and convincing people as a matter of fact the very first game i worked on which was riven the sequel to mist i tried to convince them that i should be audio director and they basically they weren't into it so you had to wait until bungie did well i did i didn't have to wait i was doing bungee at the exact same time but yeah both rhythm and myth one uh myth the fallen lords came out in the fall of 97. so while i was working with bungie i said well uh you know i'm the audio director and they're like yeah okay fine whatever i love that that's that is exactly what i wanted to hear um and i love that that just happened to have worked out too um sure so you were classically trained you have a master's degree in composition but yeah prior to working on games how much experience did you have with the sound design or the production side of things versus just picking that up as you went uh yeah i didn't get really any training on the engineering you know music sound engineering side of things that was something i picked up as the technology um got better and better but if you remember like i i started with mike salvatore back in 1980 1982. back in back in the jingle era or even before that and he he was a guitar player and and had gotten sort of some education in um uh sound engineering so he he he decided to build a studio in his in his house in the recording studio a track recording studio so i'm like okay mike's got the studio i got the degree and i got some connections you know we'll get together and he can play guitar he sings i play piano in the setting you know we'll get some synths you know we'll just start doing this stuff so that's how that worked um and we made it up as we went along i think what was handy for us is that all the high-tech stuff the sense uh digital audio recording all that stuff just started coming in naturally over the next couple of decades through the 80s and 90s so it's not like we were just plopped into a you know technological advanced thing and we just had to learn it all right we got to see it come along we learned it one little step at a time it was just hey look if we get this box we can do this cool thing so i feel sorry for you guys because you kids come into this world where really it's like there's so much technology out there you have to figure out okay well what digital audio what workstation should i learn what tools should i learn you know what what principles do i need to learn um i'm really glad that i learned principles of composition sort of in the abstract because very few people are still learning this stuff anymore it's just like i don't care how much technology you have it's like you can you grow up you guys grow up with garage band and you don't know what a scale is yeah i just learned and trust me i've worked with work with paul mccartney and he doesn't read music and he's proud of it so i'm not saying that reading music or learning you know fundamentals of music theory ought to make automatically you know or a ticket to success or even that are going to make you better at something it's possible it could strangle some of your instincts but i don't think so i think it's still good to know some of that stuff it's sort of like yeah you might be a really good writer but there's nothing wrong with sort of knowing how to spell and grammar yeah it's not going to kill you to know grammar right i mean i so anyway i was gonna save that for later but i i was i was interested as to how much how often you consciously dip into the uh the more formally trained side of uh side of composition versus just instincts um or is it even something that you need to consciously dip into or is at this point it's just part of how you think about this stuff yeah i don't even know where to start on that it's i number one i would say it's it's all of the whole right so right every once in a while when when there's a blank page or i have to just like okay i gotta come up with something new musically um i pretty much rely on instinct at that point then i look at it later and i say oh okay this this is i was working in this mode i did a third relationship i was using a puddle tone i was doing this i was doing that oh that's interesting that's the 13th and i didn't you know without the major minor third you know i analyze it sort of afterwards and when i start analyzing it that's when i can develop it so then in development i'm using more tools right it's sort of sort of like you know you doodle something and then you look at it oh okay that's interesting that could be this and i can morph it into something else so um i think it's a combination i like starting with my gut first usually and see how it strikes me and then i analyze what i did and using analysis i can extend it no it does it totally does it's interesting because i know a lot of uh i know a lot of people musically and otherwise tend to approach that stuff completely differently depending on just their workflow uh it's interesting to use drawing as an example because um a lot of the time people will start with the more analytical side they'll uh they'll reference figure drawing or get more into uh more mathematically correct perspective and uh they'll use heavy references and then once i've got the basic outline then they'll sort of dip into the more creative side and embellish and exaggerate when possible um sort of like an inverse to that uh there i i know other composers really liked very formal you know they think about big structures when i did music of the spheres i actually did think about a big you know eight movement structure and had some big plans for the key centers and moods and all sorts of other stuff so that was something i did um a little bit differently but as soon as i started to work on each individual piece i went right down to the sort of okay what gets me going what is what seems cool and then how do i expand that yeah no i get um when listening to music of the spheres it does strike me a little bit differently structurally speaking i i don't want to say more traditional but um no maybe that is a good word for it i don't know um it it's it's a little bit more formally structured that's a good way to put it this even even compared to uh gollum's prequel which the name escapes me at the moment um echoes of the first dream thank you um even though they're very similar in premise and format and i guess to an extent structure they still have a difference in personality and tone and uh i'm sure a lot of that has to do with the scale and where where the inspiration is coming from gollum's much more personal story whereas destiny was i i think you at one point mentioned that it was supposed to be a sort of yeah it was supposed to be a sort of prelude uh and like it would set the groundwork for the musical themes you wanted to use when composing for the game itself yeah nice plan huh yeah [Laughter] great eventually you got to you got to do that with gollum right that's true so now wait a minute but you have actually a surprising so this is the other thing i liked is it i i saw your first thing that you made me laugh which was why halo was important i think and then i saw you complaining about the remake which by the way i agree with but uh then i think i saw something that had been done before about adaptive audio or whatever and i thought oh this guy actually he kind of notices this stuff which most people don't so you must have some sort of music background too is that not true not formally but i do come from a musical family my dad uh um i don't know how to say this my dad i'll just say it my dad almost made it at one point back in the 80s he was he was doing uh synth rock over in england for a while um okay so he's still got the there's he was part of a pet shop boys that's pretty cool yeah yeah okay now you have to look up pet shop boys so you know who i'm talking i did i did all this research about the kind of musical people you talk about and then you throw a new one at me now i have to do more i felt so smart for knowing about gentle giant and all this stuff yes well we'll talk about that but how did you get your i i got to say the other thing that intrigued me was your animations which are wow super minimal and simple but it's you have a sense of the simplest little turn of mouth or blinky of the eye or posture of a character or a slight turn of ahead and timing it's really good i mean you i don't know what your background is or where you're attracted to but you should not just shouldn't just dink around at some point you should really get serious because whatever what you're doing even with your natural stuff is uh very watchable and a lot of fun so you have a good sense of timing which is everything oh my god yes i could go on for hours about how timing can make or break something comedically yes this or otherwise i'm always you know i'm always the one saying i need more black so yes no i remember i remember the um i remember you and joe and uh i forget who else but the three guys whenever you did the uh the commentary check for the original jason jason yes yeah it was the uh the flood the flood reveal guilty spark yeah uh right uh what was that the first or second time you saved halo by having there be a five to ten second delay before the waves start coming in [Laughter] i did i did that was actually jamie griezmann by the guy who i'm working with now he's my you know business partner and and creative director for high wire uh but jamie was the final one to work on 343 guilty spark that level he was the level design for that and he'd gone through a couple iterations and we got to that point and suddenly i think i've talked about it but all of a sudden as soon as the cutscene ended all these floods just attacked instantly and so yeah i had to make a deal with jamie to get make him give me time he says how much time do you want i'm like i want two minutes i forget i wanted more than he wanted to give me but i knew i was going to ask for more and then he would give me a certain amount and i think the amount that was given was just about right he felt like the cutscene was too long and that people were going to be so bored by having not fired their weapon for so long that he had to just like immediately slam the flood on top of you and i'm like no no no no they you have to let people live back in their bodies and believe that something really horrible happened around them yeah and absolutely look around and not know where it is and i can just increase the creepiness of the level and then boom we can start so does he does he still stand by that oh yeah i know he well he stands by but he gave me enough time okay fair enough um but to go back to answer your question which by the way i really appreciate that thank you so much um musically i don't really have much more to say other than you know musical background with dad and you know uh both of them fell into that stupid thing whenever in the late 90s they thought that classical music would make baby smarter or some something stupid like that so i had a lot of maybe it did i don't know about that all i know is that it pissed me sorry it made it it made me really angry as a kid but now now i really enjoy a lot of that stuff wow i really did i did really scare you about the language thing didn't i that's good [Laughter] and as far as animation that's all self-taught that's just that's just looking at stuff and studying it and um i bought one book okay and i didn't read most of it so i'm not an expert on animation but i've worked with animators for decades right yeah so one thing i can tell you is that timing is everything timing is everything in storytelling in game design in music in animation you know the difference you know you talk to jamie about the sandbox and the and the the firing rate on a plasma rifle and how different that can change everything and me saying i need one more beat here in the trailer in order before the reveal um or you know an animator saying i need 20 frames to do this animation instead of 15. i mean these are things that we will you know fight and die over is and they're micro timing things but we anybody who's really in the business believes that that kind of stuff is super important so oh my gosh you have an automatic sense of timing which is great a lot of times just people who are artists they just think about composition they look at a screen and they go yeah this rock needs to be here and this thing needs to be here and they you know and then they move it a little bit here and here and here meanwhile i look at that and say well until until i know how long i'm on that shot i don't have a sense of what i need to do like are we going to pan through it are we zooming in how long does it take how are we moving through this does someone appear on the screen it's just yeah no there's again absolutely um and i mean both on a micro and macro scale that's that stuff is super important the timing and pacing go hand in hand whenever it comes to structuring anything um i mean how did you decide when i'm interviewing you uh oh here we go your opening of your halo was important thing which was hilarious thank you when you floated in singing the monk chant and you stuck your friend with a plasma grenade and i don't even know who if they're those are on you know running characters or what but you put the plasma grenade on your friend and you float it up and then you just sat there on the plasma grenade sound yeah and nothing's moving um and boom then it happens it's like yeah i mean i'm sure you tried different timings i don't know why that was the perfect timing but it absolutely made me laugh it was perfect so i love that that's how you're supposed to do that okay perfect um yeah no i mean there's there's no math to that i just i i i you do care about that yeah no i it really comes down to just instinctive stuff a lot of the time when it comes to stuff like that and i'm not about to compare my goofy youtube videos to any of the stuff that you've been a part of but uh i really appreciate that you pointed that out and i i do agree yeah um back on track here for for for a bit um you've spoken before about your approach to recording for games uh how you often you'll often record instruments separately rather than all of them together so that it's easier to mix and separate the stems which makes a lot of sense but a lot of the magic that makes music feel more intimate uh i think most any musician would agree is the human element the the imperfections so like how do you get a passionate performance out of everyone while you know presumably having them play on their own to a click like that's infamously killed a lot of a lot of uh recordings having it quantized and this and that yes yes so um the click sometimes might be believe it or not might just be a piano track that i've played that i will so it won't be necessarily a click track it'll be a piano track that people can listen to so if i'm playing something with some feel and some added flow to it then they just need to match that and then other times it'll be just a click to get in and i'll ask the conductor to conduct it freely like the majority of music of the spheres everybody was in the studio at the same time and the conductor conducted it in a it felt way it wasn't there was we weren't trying to synchronize with a movie um or anything so we we could do that but for the most part when we when i hire musicians to come in um if i have the piece done the way i want it like for echoes of the first streamer there's a lot of roboto in that roboto means breathing and ebbs and flows yeah and if you have let's say uh this strings um you know 10 violins 10 violas 10 cellos whatever it is you have a big group of strings you have 25 30 string players if the first thing you do is you have them all play the whole piece together and they play it with feeling you've got that recorded then you can go in and say okay now just first violins but listen to what you just did so the first violins are playing again to the emotional performance they just did and so they're playing it again that way and so i still get emotions and feeling from even if i isolate just the first violins they're playing it the way they played when they were hearing everybody at the same time is that always the way you did it or um no it's not um like the halo one theme um okay well that's that's a bit of a given there's so much synth in in in the halo except the very first halo there is is uh we know we had sampled strings and then i brought in the the live players which was a small group but they played along with what they heard right but they were playing very aggressively so like i would tell it to tell us like a don't play aggressive and and i like the slop i'm i'm looking for the sound of the strings in between the other notes right so they're going way across the bar they're going you know plants or jumping tents [Music] which by the way is one of the things i don't like about the anniversary edition is they didn't record it the way i wrote it they did they they split the strings up with the low strings this one upper strings what [Music] it's like no it's not da da da it's that's what they should be playing all of that and it that that aggressiveness and confusion is built into the music and that's what i wanted and that's what i got at the original recording and then they you know they walked away from it because they didn't know what i had done because they weren't allowed to talk to me which is ridiculous uh yeah yes it is [Music] uh you've had the chance to work with some some incredible voice talent over the years whether it be you know big names like keith david and nolan north or you know more niche fan favorites you know guys like andrew mccage or david scully or you know bob o'donnell um with all that experience uh working with actors what are some tips or or tricks or just pointers or anything like that that you think could help aspiring directors or voice directors well i have a hard and fast rule which i do not break unless something has gone really south and that is you do not do line reads for your actors so interesting them the script you give them the emotions you give them the setup you answer their questions but you never read the line to them um now there are a couple of guys like nolan north will say hey it's okay go ahead give me a line read i'm fine with that and i'm like of course you are you're lazy i mean he just he would rather just get in and get out because he is the best mimic i've ever seen in my life that guy can mimic you know heartbeat yeah so if you say hey come over here you got to get over to the left side and get the tank he'll go hey come over here you got to go to the left side get the tag and he'll just give you exactly back what you did and then you're in and that's the worst thing yeah you don't like you don't want that first from an actor you want to hear what their interpretation of it is right exactly exactly so a lot of times you'll they'll their first line reads and you'll go oh man they're putting the emphasis on a different word or a different syllable and they they're putting a comma in or a pause where i've never heard it before yeah and a lot of times especially like joe and i joe let's just go with halo joe would be the main script writer and we would do a table reading i would play a lot of the character voices maybe a couple other guys would be around the table and we would read through it and a lot of times i'm just listening for is the meaning coming through are there weird syllables that aren't going to translate is there stupid sci-fi jargon that is idiotic and should be cut i mean i'm looking at it from one way but we've spent time with the scripts hopefully and then we give it to the actors and what we want then is something that's fresh and we haven't heard before but yeah a lot of times writers will say no i they hear it a certain way in their head and that's what they want to hear back and as audio director i'm more if i hear something that's oh that's way better than anything we ever did at a table read let's make sure let's use that so i in in in with the actors i'll do many many takes i don't want to tire them out but i'll do many takes i'll keep all the takes i don't make my selects usually at the session i like to go later after a day or two and listen to the session again and i go oh you know i didn't even notice it but take three is way better than take five that's that i'm using that one instead yeah so uh so no line reads and record everything i mean there's no reason not to record everything gets get lots of takes and come at it with fresh ears on another day so you record everything in one day only tell the actors um the minimal about the minimal that they need to know in order to get the right emotions so if you say yeah read this line like you just heard that your brother died okay as and you've probably seen video of me making fun of joe because he gives too much backstory to an actor actually i can see the actor's eyes start to glaze over and they have no idea what that means so they'll say so you want it faster and then i'll go yeah faster [Laughter] that is true i mean a writer sometimes feels like oh you the actor needs to have all this backstory but the actor is usually there they got another gig after your gig they're doing something else they don't even understand you know they have no possible way of understanding the huge history of their own character in this game but if they're but what they should be able to do is read a line as though they just found out that their brother died if they could do that then that's all we need they don't need to know that they were you know taken by halsey when they were seven years old and had all their bones replaced and like they don't need to know any of that stuff right like i don't think steve downes knew anything about master chief's backstory all he needed to know for me was yeah basically you're clint eastwood you're a man of few words but everything you say is important right okay so that's all i needed yeah no but i i do really like the push and pull there um especially when it comes to directors they're ten there's often a tendency for people to fall into this sort of okay can you be more happy or you know just like trying to switch emotions like dials uh which is from what i've heard the worst thing you can do uh actors need a bit more context yeah you don't want it they they need enough context and it's like well then you get to the point if you're trying to fine-tune a take if you've given him the right emotional place to be to begin with you don't want to suddenly switch okay i know i told you your brother just died but now pretend it's a surprise birthday party and read the same line like that's insane so uh but it's like okay so it is sad but you could say yeah just be just a little bit less external with your emotion now or yeah now i actually just need it a little bit faster or i can just do it a little bit softer you know just those kinds of things you can get you know you're fine-tuning right and you're not just taking the giant dial and going yo you were sad now be happy it's like oh that's that's stupid whether it be poor mixing or annoying sound effects or overscoring or whatever games today of all scales and budgets can be pretty hit or miss in the audio department as we mentioned in the past what are some of the biggest audio related mistakes that you see in games today what are they how do you think they happen and what can developers do to avoid making those mistakes uh first of all do know do nothing that's annoying sound can be the most annoying thing ever repetitive sound bad mixing just don't just don't be annoying that's the first thing the second thing is don't think by adding more stuff it's going to get better sometimes it just gets cluttered and your sound palette is cluttered and you can't mix anymore this is more sometimes nothing is the most sometimes nothing is the most and if you want your music to stand out then make sure you've had a lot of no music around it so just like just shut up just don't have music for a while and then when music comes in it can really have a place the other thing i would say is that people so if you know anything about digital audio there's a thing called normalized where you can take any recording normalize it and it's like oh let's normalize everything it's like that's not the way the world is most things in the world are very soft if you if you record a real environment it's like the noise floor the sounds you're hearing are just above the noise floor and then you know a bird chirps and it's up here well if you normalize everything the noise floor now is as loud as the bird chirping or the tree falling and suddenly i hear this all the time with you know weapons foley it's like it's like this it's like the same volume as the the background ambience it makes no sense yes and this is a mistake that happens in tv and film too it's like the the sound of the you know the hero sound of the guy getting punched is as loud in the scene as the nuclear explosion that happens 10 seconds later yeah because you can only be so loud right yeah especially with tv i think they have a a compression of some kind over the master output or something i know radio does that it drives me insane um yes so uh dynamic range is to me probably one of the most important things as you're creating stuff as you're making sounds if you're doing weapo if you're doing foley you have somebody drawing a gun out of their holster and then cocking it and then shooting it well you already know the loudest thing needs to be the firing right if you normalize the weapon click and the drawing out of the leather to be normalized everything is at a hundred percent then that's ridiculous it doesn't sound real i mean i get mad at the startup sounds on on these games like i'm just like playing halo master chief collection i'm like oh my gosh the opening sound that you cannot control is louder than anything else in the game i'm like why make that the soft thing so people go oh gee maybe i should turn my computer up and then the game starts like whoa it's loud and cool but no i've turned the whole computer down because your stupid opening boom and you know the logo comes up and it's the loudest thing you could possibly do you're right they did that with the xbox logo and they did that with the playstation logo they make those things like the loudest hero sounds you can get and then all the games are softer than that and that's like oh that's that's smart you remind me a bit of my you remind me a bit of my dad he he loves to he loves to complain about uh the netflix sound effect especially that that gigantic that comes in every time you launch the app exactly yeah yeah no that's horrible that is yeah no anyway yeah dynamic range uh louds aren't loud unless there's something unless there's a lot of soft so you can't have all loud all the time i think that i think the industry is getting better with that kind of thing but i also if i had to guess and this is a guess of a dude who doesn't know how games are made but i think a lot of that probably has to do with maybe a tendency to overcompensate for less than ideal sound setups you know crappy turtle beach headsets or you know back in the day a stereo crt tv with with the speakers built in because the the audio is so poor the environment is so bad to begin with that some of that more quiet stuff is just going to be lost if you you know treat it like you would a proper setup with good headphones or 5.1 surround um so i don't know uh i don't know if you've seen this a lot of games uh the last one i can think of is the last of us part two um but naughty dog especially are really good with this stuff um they'll just let you choose before we even start the game it'll show you uh a setup for your audio setup so you can choose okay i have stereo quadrophonic 7.1 and you can choose the dynamic range and whether you want voices to be mixed to the center speaker or to all the front speakers and it's really intuitive yeah i mean i there's a part of me that is nervous about doing that and then there's a part of me that understands why you want to give people the options what i would say is you want to make sure that whatever the default is is the very very best default because most people i think the the statistics tell us that it's something like 92 percent of everybody never changes a single default setting so that means you better make sure your defaults are good you shouldn't depend on people customizing their settings if people want to open the hood and you know change set the points on their own spark plugs that's fine with me um i i i just i'm a little nervous like i i sometimes i've talked about it like making a gourmet you know meal it's like look i'm going to do my best you you can trust me as a chef i'm going to make this great gourmet meal and then i'm going to present it to you yeah and the first thing i'm not going to do is say well here's some tabasco here's some ketchup here's some a1 sauce and here's some salt and pepper and here's some garlic powder just go ahead and season it the way you normally like to season right right see i know i'd rather have them say i'd rather have somebody eat the thing i made and say wow this is kind of bland and then okay well that's that's the way i liked it uh rather than have people go i always put this much salt and this much garlic and this much pepper on everything there's always that there's always that fear if you show them that they can play with it then they might uh they might get a little overzealous change things the way they're not supposed to be end up smothering it in ketchup or whatever um exactly so uh that's i'm gonna always be a little bit more of a control freak when it's like no you should you should play it my way you should you should accept my mix uh the problem with that of course is that we have much more understanding and control over console systems than we do let's say pcs and everybody's sound card is different everybody's you know there's so many different variables that go into that and most of the time people have pc systems understand their own unique system enough that that we they should probably have some tools to change stuff up a little bit where would you say that you find the most inspiration from sonically like do you draw more from the classically trained music theory jerry goldsmith side of things or the the gentle giant prague rock stuff [Music] yeah i don't think i can split those two it's they're uh that's what i thought yeah it's a bit of a it's it's internalized within me uh sometimes i don't know where things come from you know it could have been some peter gabriel thing that i completely forgot about or it could have been some bach piece i played when i was 12 years old so it could be yesterday from the beatles for example it could be yesterday all i did that one on purpose um yeah it's it's like the way i look at it is that you are i think i've talked about this in one of my talks which is you know whatever whatever your heroes are whoever your hero is um don't follow in their footsteps seek what they sought that's a great way of putting it i like that yeah well that's not my thing that's some this is a famous japanese philosopher look it up but yeah don't follow in their footsteps seek what they saw um it's a it's just a great way to think because it's like whatever they were after well i want i might i'm going to want to go after that too like i want to affect people emotionally by storytelling or music and storytelling and i'm going to do that and and nicholas rosa did it with ben hur and i was seven years old and i heard it and my mind was blown well i'm not gonna try to become nicholas rosa he's this greek crazy guy who you know died in the 60s or whatever like i know nothing about nicholas rosa i'm not going to follow him in his footsteps now i do want to learn orchestration and counterpoint and theory maybe the way he did you know that he learned i want to understand the fundamentals of constructing music and composing but like i want like i'm seeking that same thing i don't want to go oh i need to sound like this piece from ben hur so i'm gonna copy that yeah like no i want to make my own if you're gonna if you're going to make culture something that affects culture you have to absorb culture and then whatever comes out of you as an artist is is going to reflect what you absorbed and consumed but hopefully if you have integrity you're going to have your own approach yeah i think it really just comes down to inspiration versus imitation yeah yeah absolutely so for me at least when i compare stuff like oni or myth uh to your newer material gollum ost odst musical spheres etc i feel like i can hear you getting more confident in some of your ideas so like assuming i'm correct in that judgment what was the process of building that confidence like do you think it came more from having a growing number of successful projects under your belt or you know just the fact that just the act of experimenting more with different musical ideas that's very interesting so there as an artist i think you're always you're fighting the imposter syndrome no matter how old you get you're fighting the syndrome of like okay it's my best stuff behind me uh if i visit the well one more time is it going to be dry like yeah i mean that really still stays inside my head so um but i've gone back to what i thought was an empty well so many times and still come up with something that i just sort of and because i've done it enough times i kind of have the confidence that i'll probably do it again so i i think there is more confidence there and sometimes it's also stuff that i was unsure of at first sometimes those are the things that over time i've gone wow you know i was unsure about that that that and that and they all turned out to be really successful now that doesn't mean that doesn't mean everything i'm unsure of will be successful but it gives me more confidence that i don't have to just throw away something that i am unsure of i i live with the uncertainty longer um to see how it's going to what kind of legs it has right so i think it's it's interesting and insightful on your part that you're hearing that you know some building of confidence over my career so that's fascinating i would never have thought about that now although as i i'm actually playing odst again now um i haven't played it in years and i'm like wow that was there's some nice stuff in here and like i'm glad i went with that and i remember when i came up with that little lick and you know i was confident enough just to keep going with it and believe that this might actually work out so yeah it was bold i hear i think i hear what you're saying yeah i remember um i think part of what what got me thinking about this was um after i put out my first halo video my dad decided to play all of them which i'm i'm quite proud of oh excellent i need to go i was just very interested in his reaction whenever he first heard some of halo 3 stuff uh he couldn't help but say out loud wow that's bold and not not in a bad way but just like wow opening with piano just two notes okay like i don't think he would have done that with some of your earlier work and it really shows that's probably true yeah that's probably true i mean uh so there is a little bit of a story there uh piano tended to be sort of a scratch track instrument it's something you use and then you orchestrate the real instruments um we had one piece that was primarily a piece mike wrote and mike was i've talked has told a story before but like when we were doing myth um i had this cello line it was all dark and mysterious and then we needed a bunch more music and mike had a piece it was just very simple piano was the siege of madrid like mike i really like this but that's like i was i should have done that he goes yeah i was thinking what would marty do and i'm like well yeah i i wanted to do that but anyways that so when i i put the siege of madrigal into the game and then jason jones came in like oh i don't know about that piano and i'm like no jason trust me this is a good one people are going to like this it's going to be memorable it's a bold choice yeah so he goes ah okay so i convinced them that it should be in there and then because people ended up really liking it and because it almost got killed because jason wasn't sure about it i sort of as a joke i put it as the easter egg in every game we ever did since then there's some place in the level that you can hear siege amero uh and when we got around to doing halo 3 and the trailer and i just did these piano notes that i really did do piano notes yeah just as a just as a sink point for me to know where things were happening on the screen and but i i every time they played i liked the feeling i had yeah so i said i'm gonna go with that but that's i think i've told the story but like when the microsoft marketing execs heard it they laughed so i had to like say okay it doesn't matter that these nimrods laughed i'm going to go ahead and double down on it and [Music] i'm gonna like and so i'm not sure if i would done that if they hadn't laughed so that's that's that's interesting because i mean yeah i don't a lot of people would be killed by that people laughing is something that you want to take seriously that's just okay well that idea is never okay yeah yeah no i felt i felt very risky i mean i felt like oh gosh maybe i'm wrong but like and i knew the context of where that trailer was going to be seen for the first time and like everybody else was they were all blur trailers with you know trailer music and they all looked and sounded the same and then halo 3 came on and it sounded different it looked different and of course sometimes that's all you need to do you just need to stand out from everybody else so speaking of halo um when it comes to games that assume there's always some degree of compromise like you said but halo 2 is a bit of a special case um bungie devs have described it in the past as um as things like harsh or brutal and my favorite was like they were going to die i i'd like to talk about that a little more in depth if you're comfortable with that because i know that was a very turmoilous i didn't say that right it was a very whatever tumultuous thank you yes i did that yesterday too i was like okay i don't remember this time all right okay um okay cool so uh so for those who aren't aware um just for for context um do you think you could give a sort of brief rundown of what happened with halo 2 you know what went wrong what the e3 demo and what that was all like from your perspective yeah well uh let's just take a step back one thing i can say that i've learned over all the years is there are many many things that are important in game development and selling a game okay so how you introduce the game to the public how you uh get people all riled up about buying a game and then how you get the game into people's hands all those things are important they're not equally important so i know you're going with this yeah so what i would say and what i've learned is if you find that you're working way more on the show to sell the game than you actually are on the game you probably are in trouble yeah um and that's a mistake we started to make on halo 2. a couple of you know many things that went into that number one we started halo 2 after halo 1 became this big success so the expectations were really high and we put pressure on ourselves like oh yeah we have to just really knock it out of the park and then we we did some stupid things in terms of leadership and sort of splitting the studio up into different projects rather than saying hey everybody there's nothing we can do about this halo 2 is the giant gorilla in the room right it's just it's like you have to just pay attention to halo 2. you can't have two other projects you know in the wings happening at the same time and then we did this other thing which was the very first trailer we did where master chief jumps out and cortana says what if you miss i won't like that was a cool trailer and it was like that whole trailer was shot one frame at a time in engine so we could tell everybody this is all rendered in engine uh yeah why am i not surprised well no i mean people do people yeah exactly that's why i say yeah yeah i remember you on another podcast i love the way um that it was put where it's like we we have to now say that it's rendered in engine because we know you're suspicious [Laughter] well i mean there were so many we would see other trailers and stuff and it's like oh that wasn't rendered in their engine this is you know this is a this is a this is maya this is whatever this is something else so it's like no this is our engine and we we invented and implemented stencil shadows into the engine so like walking through and the light spinning and the shadows going dynamics dynamic lighting was so cool you know the elevator coming down and jumping out it's like a great trailer so it's like wow we excited everybody like crazy like that was our teaser trailer to say to the world hey everybody we're doing halo 2. so here's how cool it's going to be people went nuts and it wasn't long after that that we realized well now we have to do something for e3 the following year and this time we thought okay we better do a really big show where we play the game live to prove to everybody the game you can play this game so now it's all about working on the game being able to be played live and that's when the stencil shadows started getting less and less so if you look at the e3 live gameplay trailer you know which starts with sergeant johnson saying you know in the you know smoking no smoking appearances i promise bullshit yeah that was that was great and then there wasn't it was that was the way the game played unfortunately we couldn't ship that game either um wasn't running on an xbox right or at least no it was running those were running on xboxes yes absolutely that demo ran it didn't have trouble we just couldn't do the whole game the way we did that demo okay um the thing is is that we kept like the very first teaser trailer we used the engine to make this great trailer and then the next trailer which was live gameplay we used live gameplay and the engine to do it but it was so scripted if we had kept going in that direction we would have shipped call of duty because and sorry but call of duty is it's not like those are fun things but they're scripted things that you you just navigate your way through the way your design the designer wants you to go every step you take you trigger the next scripted thing we we're all about randomization ability to choose where you want to go different weapons different vehicles and by responding pseudo-non-linearity that just player choice et cetera et cetera and the e3 demo in earth city was just totally scripted like yeah you could you were on a rail you all these things were there to just be this great dramatic scripted gameplay it was real like you know we were like the star of the show and we had some hefty competition so we won the show but when we got back to the studio we were like yeah we haven't been working on the game we've been working on this show and we can't ship that and when you realize that what you've been spending all this time it's like rip everything out none of that's shippable uh that was that was pretty depressing so that's what it was we realized we couldn't ship what we showed for for context and perspective um i doubt i'm the first person to say this but halo 2 is a three-act structure with no third act they that there was so much that had to be ripped out um well i mean yes i mean that is like oh halo 2 is a three-act structure with no third act so act three is halo three yeah i mean we realized that right towards the end and i mean i remember i i'm sure i've talked about this before too but like when joe showed me what the what had been cut like in all the stuff that we're gonna have to throw away and redo and i said to him at the end i'm looking at the script and i'm like joe are you telling me that we're ending the game and as as the arbiter he goes no no no you're the master chief i said no you're the master chief in a cut scene the last level you play the last character you are playing as a character that you're in control of is the arbiter that's that's that's not gonna work and he's like yeah we don't have any time yeah oh my gosh that's why i would say people are gonna throw their controllers at the tv um and you know here's the thing it's like well it's it's a cliffhanger i'm like oh gosh that's the worst thing to do a three three year wait for a cliffhanger it's like that's i just thought it was really unfair i i love the fact that people still think halo 2 is like the best halo ever i'm just like that is hilarious to me um well there's there's a lot to love about it but if you step if you're taking a step back you could play halo one two and three all like in one sitting in the master chief collection it's like okay well now you can binge it it's great but boy yeah like i was i was replaying the game with my sister a little while ago um i remember whenever we finished halo 2 um i was so ready for her to have this negative reaction of just like really that really really but but instead uh she's just like oh okay cool and and i i think and um i i had to ask like why are you not mad about that ending why why are you reacting this way well because halo 3 is right here i can just we're doing that in a week oh yeah yeah yeah of course yeah that's yeah go back to 2004 yeah when when there we hadn't even you know we weren't even promising there was going to be a halo 3. obviously when you finished halo 2 you know sir finishing this fight yeah fade to black i i remember even saying to joe joe there's not enough black in the universe that you can give me for for me to give a satisfying ending to this game no no no we'll give you black and you bring the music in and it'll feel like an ending it's like no it will never feel like it'll feel like it's trying to be an ending um yeah i can still sing what the music does there and it's like yeah it's not gonna work ah man anyway but how old were you did you play it when it came out you couldn't oh no um i uh i was pretty late to the party i remember you'll probably like this i remember being in elementary school and one of one of the cool kids of uh of what was it second or third grade came into it came into school uh uh holding a backpack like there was something you shouldn't have in there like like there's something like guy you don't it's like a drug dealer about to show you what's under the trench coat but it's just yeah yeah um but he just comes over a bunch of us huddle up and i'm around in a circle and he just shows us a copy of halo 2. and it's just how did you get this [Laughter] so yeah um i think i started playing halo 1 shortly after that um and uh that was one of my first games full stop um but you probably know that um uh i i know that i know enough about your story only from the couple of videos i've watched these yeah when you say halo is really important to you i'm like well that's cool but like i didn't really know how old you were i assumed you were young but somehow halo 1 sort of started you in a certain way like you appreciate what was happening in your experience with halo 1 that you judge a lot of other things by that which i think is cool and frankly i mean i'm thrilled that um you know a lot of these stories i've told 20 years ago right so i'm glad to be able to continue telling these stories to a new generation of kids uh but i'm actually glad that um there's more generations of people who actually appreciate what we did and it actually has some legs and it lasts and it's a certain way at a certain extent it seems to differentiate from other games that you could be playing right now there's still something that we did that some people i don't know if they didn't learn learn from it i'm hoping that everybody like your generation kind of learns from what we did and says hey you know if they did it 20 years ago we should be able to do that now because i feel like there's some other i feel like there's some lessons that were lost along the way i'm not sure why i don't know i think it really comes down to a case-by-case basis um i'm sure a lot of a lot of developers are more receptive to that sort of thing than others different people are more inclined to care about certain things and learn different ways um but yeah to answer to very briefly answer your question yeah i i started playing halo 2 after i got halo 1 but i finished halo 2 before halo 1. uh so that's funny yeah it wasn't exactly the best way to experience it but it was really just because i couldn't resist not playing halo 2 when i had a copy of it but i got stuck at some parts of combat evolved so i just i'll just play halo 2 instead um so yeah i don't think you really whenever you're like seven or eight years old i don't think you really have enough of an understanding of storytelling to be mad about a cliffhanger especially when you go back when you can go back and play the prequel immediately you know sure sure um but retro retroactively yeah no i if i was if i was this age and i played that i would be i yeah um so how much of the game really ended up on the cutting room floor like beyond the story how much of what shipped on that disk in 2004 as a is a product of creativity versus compromise that is a really good question um i know you've got the voice acting for the whole third act archived somewhere i do yeah i mean and that's that's the voice acting with the arbiter being the dervish so there's a whole bunch of michael wincott as the prophet of truth you know being chased by keith david through the ark that was on the earth right and the big climaxes on earth and the arc that was uncovered new mombasa um so yeah i mean this stuff like the script is done first and then we hope you know we hope this the game the general game design is is crafted with some story elements and then the script is kind of written around that because wait you have to get actors hired and you have to do that stuff and you have to animate so we never got to the point of animation uh on any of that third act stuff so i had the voice work is the about the only thing we had and then we realized we had to go cut all that change it i had to bring some of the actors back into the studio and do the new stuff um so it it it's to me that a lot of it seems like a compromise but we compromised with what six months left to go i forget what well it's funny i mean you see right behind me there right that's delta temple that's the white board for delta temple that's not an actual whiteboard for delta temple paul bertone had all these whiteboards that he took with him had him in his house he said he told me and jamie he was gonna trash him and i'm like no so i know that's great that's history i'd love to have a scan of that or something just be able to see them on twitter i'll have to check that it's it's always it's always fun seeing seeing how this stuff came together especially with something as chaotic as halo 2. yeah that high charity on one side you can i'll show this so that's high charity oh and that's delta temple and that's it's it's actually concept art is that concept art on a whiteboard yeah yeah oh i'm gonna have to look at that later and the reasons we have the whiteboards is because once we knew we were going to cut all this stuff it's like okay paul bertone joe state and jason jones all went into this one office locked themselves away it was right by my desk we put a sign up called uh what we call it the clubhouse i think so we just like don't disturb the clubhouse and they just got they had white boards in the clubhouse and they rejiggered the whole way the game was going to go we kept as much stuff as we could and then they came out and presented here's here's what the new levels are going to be and here's where you end and here's what the deal is and then we went to town actually trying to execute on that so speaking of troubled development um it's no secret that gollum's development was a little troubled at times are you comfortable shedding on light and some of the challenges that you and the team faced while working on it yeah sure i mean that was a very small team i think the dev team for gollum was maybe between eight and ten people total we took the chance of like let's jump into this new technology and sony wanted us to do something for the playstation vr right and the playstation vr of course was on was a product that hadn't shipped it was unproven there was no market but they were willing to fund us to do something so it was unproven technology we decided to do something that no one had done with the technology um the team within at sony that were the ones who hired us to begin with and believed in what we were doing left like one guy went started a company in chicago another guy went to another company everybody just was gone suddenly we would call and there was like no none of our none of our friends were at sony anymore it was all new people they didn't really know who we were so there was a point where some money sort of didn't get paid and things happened and you know christmas was canceled for us i mean it was like what is going on and it was it was a crisis it was an existential crisis for high wire uh we were like i don't know if we can finish this so i don't know if we're gonna have if they're gonna keep funding us we didn't know what was gonna happen we had to like start looking to do other things so when it all kind of got straightened around a little bit we were able to get back to working on you know we got the money to finish golem but we didn't get um we really missed the opportunity to ship at a point where it probably would have been opportunity the holiday vr craze yeah if we had shipped then and had this new control scheme that no one had seen before but everything was kind of new at the beginning so people would have maybe been so reluctant to try something different by the time we did ship which was at least a year late whatever small niche market was even playing vr games they were like well this is how vr should be controlled and you guys are doing some wacko control scheme yeah and i i still think our control scheme is really cool and if people just gave it a shot they would they would love it but um to a certain extent we really tried we pushed in almost too many directions at the same time we pushed the tech and the visuals to do a fully open world fully explorable world from sitting down but you could still go 360 degrees in any direction right explore in any direction open world long vistas and you know vr just isn't quite ready for that yet now i think there's some technology that's there and if we can get you know if there's a possibility ever of porting golem to a a better more robust system with better controllers than your laser rather than light bulb and yeah and if everything is just works a little bit better and the vistas are good i think i think golem might actually have a find an audience because there's some things about it i really love i i um i actually played gollum for a bit prep preparing for the interview picked up a picture i did wow how many times did you have to read calibrates that's the thing i didn't finish gollum [Music] and i hate saying it but it was it was a challenge to get through at times because of the technical limitations i'd love to hear jamie's okay i'd love to hear jamie's insight on that um he's got it well um i'm a little afraid to ask but did high wire games suffer from crunch while working on gollum um no one of the things about high-wire games is that we are not going to force people into horrible crunches now there was a certain amount of crunch like jamie and i jamie definitely probably more than anybody crunched like crazy um towards the end just to get it out the door but like no we didn't the studio wasn't crunching on golem yeah i've heard a lot of different opinions on crunch culture but one of the most concerning to me was in any developer that i spoke to who uh who told me that they believed it was a necessary evil that that no game on earth could even ship without it i will agree with that so let me just say well okay so let me just say what that means no game on earth should ever ship with the halo 2 crunch yeah okay but i can't imagine doing a tv show doing if you have a deadline if you got to get this commercial on tv because the super bowl is happening on january 6 like whatever that is there is going to be a moment where you have to put in the extra time towards the end if you're in entertainment you do not have a nine to five job with two weeks been paid vacation even even me believe it or not sponsors with their deadlines i mean and i'm not again i do not want to compare myself to the gaming industry with this but i mean it's anywhere if it's your job and you have deadlines yes and if you if you're on a roll like you're doing something it's like yeah i need to get this out by five i told everybody it's gonna be live five o'clock tomorrow and you're still working on it the day before you go oh my gosh it'd be so much more fun if i did this other thing well all of a sudden it's 10 11 12 o'clock at night and you're still working on it well that's crunch that's what that is it's individual creative people saying i can make this better i still have a little time i want to get this in under the wire so the idea that you're not going to have passionate people towards the end of a project working extra and that could be called crunch is insane to have management saying you are not allowed to leave if you have to put in 80 hours you have to put in 120 hours you're not putting in your amount of work if you're not here 100 hours we're going to bring we're planning on it in the last three months of this project yes okay so when they when the management of these people actually plan for these kind of crunches that's criminal that's criminally insane i hate that but i do understand the side that says you can't do a tv show you can't do a movie you can't do a game without at some point a certain amount of extra final one final effort is all that remains i mean there you have to that's going to happen and you hope people are excited about that but to force people into killing themselves and breaking up with their families and you know that's just insane yeah that can't happen i think it really just becomes the difference between whether or not it is voluntary versus you know just we have to get this thing out yeah and as a matter of fact i also think that if you have the right kind of people they're going to want the the you you actually start seeing this you start seeing them they're staying later and later and they're like eating at their desk they're sleeping under their desk and doing these crazy things yeah and then when if you're in a position of management you say look you got to go home i want you to go home i want you to spend the weekend with your kids like this isn't good you're not what you're doing is not good for you which means it's not going to be good for us so you're not allowed to come in sometimes you actually have to say no you can't volunteer to crunch anymore you have to take a break good that's so refreshing to hear that's indeed you don't really hear that kind of thing in entertainment especially gaming it's yeah no that's what we're trying to do and we're not the only ones there are other veterans in the industry that that are hoping to have studios that have some sanity but i i think it's going to be impossible to say okay we need to ship you know on november 7th and our final milestone is you know october 20th and not think that the two weeks prior to october 20th that people aren't going to put in more than 40 hours right i mean they're just going to it's just i think a lot of that ties into the whole you know i mean i don't know if you also are like this or people you work around but i feel as i feel like with a lot of uh with a lot of creative projects especially larger ones it can be so easy to get invested and then in gaming's in gaming especially it turns into feature creep where there's always more you want to add to it without deadlines i don't know if i'd ever get anything done i'd just be inter i'd be iterating on it constantly and it's you need that you need that final cutoff point that says okay this is the part wherever it has to go live you have to get it out the door it has to ship uh as opposed to you know my you know my three things right so uh do i well i thought you did your research um yeah if you if you watch my uh [Music] i don't know there's something i i did a thing with this five years ago in sweden so it's on it's on my youtube channel it's probably way down the list it's the nordic game conference but i've talked about this for years but i have my principle of game development is there's three steps number one and i used to have this on my whiteboard back at bungie four years just was up there so number one was that around what was that was that up in the same place as respecting the goose yeah be nice to the goose was over on this side and then three the three principles number one don't die [Music] number two ship number three make money so that sounds stupid but actually it's of course it's brilliant of course of course but of course don't die there's a lot of meaning there don't die don't kill yourself nothing is worth dying for when it comes to what we're doing okay so number one if you die nothing everything else has failed so don't die keep yourself healthy don't die ship now that's really important because it doesn't matter what you do if you never ship and ship could be just hit the milestone hit the deadline get something in get something in people's hands whatever that is and that's how you and then make money so like if you're not making money you can't do the other things yeah i am remembering this now yeah yes you cannot make money if you're dead or you haven't shipped so you have to do it in that order right that goes down to like the smallest level of what like even what you're doing a web show right well you're not gonna kill yourself at some point you're gonna have to figure out how to pace yourself but then you need to ship you need to get it on your youtube channel um and then you hope that you get an audience and that's the same as making money or your advertisers want you to do it and they like what you're doing like if you stop making money then you're not going to have a project so but you have to do it in that order if you find yourself killing yourself you you're violating rule one um some some five-ish years ago uh you said that you felt that the gaming industry was about to reach its golden age are we there yet what's how's that how's that going wow i don't remember saying that you'll have to remind me what i meant i i i probably i you know there was a point when i jumped into the video game business i thought wow i think i've missed it i think it's already the golden age has already happened i hope i can jump in and you know grab onto the tails and see what happens so it's weird to look now back in hindsight and people think like oh marty was one of the pioneers what no not at all um [Music] uh i think to a certain extent with the xbox and the playstation 2 and all the nintendo products and the pcs i think the last 20 years there's a lot of golden age stuff going on but it's we're now at a point where people no longer have to make the kind of compromises in production quality because of the platforms so i'm looking forward to seeing how much that frees up people but um it's i'm still shocked that the things that i'm being told we can't do because we don't have the cpu or we don't have the bandwidth or we don't i'm like what like ha ha you know we you know back in my day we did it on you know 52 megabytes you know or whatever um right i mean i still remember like the first time we we we bought a a new rack mounted hard drive this had a fan to cool it and it was like if we buy this this was in the 90s we bought this hard drive put it in the rack we could record to it and i'm like well this is it this is the pinnacle of space and hard drives it was one gigabyte and it was the first time we had anything we could say gigabyte and it was like this is a full gigabyte yeah and now you're sitting there with like you know a terabyte on a usb drive and it's like what i remember i i mean even on a much smaller scale than that i remember reading um i remember reading terabyte on a hard drive and thinking how what and nowadays it's a standard everyone has one you're weird if you don't have that much space of course i know i know um i mean i gotta i get like what is it do i have three terabytes in my dropbox now something like that yeah yeah so anyway it's just like because of like how powerful how fast how much you know all these things but people tend to like flood with oh okay now the visuals have to be all 4k at 60 frames a second and all of a sudden they filled everything up yeah we still need bandwidth like i still need i'm going to be limited on voices i physics don't work like well we can't have physics on these plants well then take the plants out that's the way i feel so anyway yeah now i get you but i mean think about your your animated uh videos it's like okay 4k 60 frames a second i don't think you need to yeah right it's like like look at what you're trying to do maybe that's not the ideal right so a lot of that's just buzz words it helps sell your hardware this and that and exactly unfortunately i think a lot of it is indicative of what people uh tend to gravitate towards more like what what like what is more easily recognizable for the average consumer oh i see more pixels this is quantifiable or this or you know something more abstract like the way sound is approached it's it's harder for people to measure that they don't pay as much attention to it on average visuals are you know it's quite literally in your face you're looking at it so it's easier to measure incremental upgrades i think well i mean this is why i think it's cool that people in your age bracket which is i still sort of am astounded at the insight that someone your age has so when you're looking at when you're comparing halo original with the remastered version and you're just looking at something as simple as why is the flashlight no longer needed maybe that's indicative of a problem yeah and i'm like yes why does this kid see that and these people that did this thing 10 years ago not have a clue about it i i honestly don't get stuff like that no it just seems so obvious to me i just don't understand it me too man like yeah there's just two why is it so bright and why did you change all the background textures and make everything confusing like can't you see if you played our game that like this is why we gave you a flashlight yeah it's like it was to make things scary and like you dark and so you use the flashlight i mean to be fair watching you say this is hilarious yeah i heard i heard a few people say that it was therapeutic in a way but yeah i i don't know i uh from what i've heard and a few people did reach out to me after i put that out i'm sure this will come as a surprise to practically nobody who listens to this or he works in the industry but it really does seem to be a product of mismanagement and uh and um deadlines i i what i also appreciate about this new generation of people your age who are like saying oh gosh you know we get to talk to marty and and i really appreciate that you guys are excited about that but what it makes me realize is like we all thought he was dead because like like number one i'm old so it's like wow he's still alive that's amazing but number two i haven't really engaged with the halo community for a long time i never stopped loving halo i talked to myself blue in the face about halo you know 15 years ago we were talking about i talked about halo all the time so but i'm glad to see that people are still playing it i'm actually thrilled that there is such a thing as the master chief collection that i could even complain about i mean that in and of itself is an honor that i that it exists so kudos to 343 and all the people who work so hard to make something that i can even complain about just but just from a sort of oh what might have been standpoint like joe marcus paul jamie me jason we're all still here in seattle like none of us left or died like as soon as you're gonna make the new version of it like yeah improve it make the anniversary edition make all this stuff but if you're also going to just bring forward the thing we made just run a bias once and we'll come in for free and just spend a day telling you what you could fix oh marcus would have come in and within two seconds he would have said hey wait did you include the shader that does blah blah blah did i put in at the last minute or whatever it is or joe would have said oh wait a minute that's we swapped out uh captain keys you know cinematic character you know just before we shift and we forgot to tell you about it or something right like his in-game character was not the cinematic character and joe will remember that he swapped it out with like 30 minutes left because that's the way jill worked but like we have the tribal memory and the tribal knowledge to just come forward and say hey you know this is great you're doing this we can fix it you know we'll take it the last ten percent of the way and i don't know why we couldn't imagine how many people at three for three would be thrilled to be able to work with the original guys i mean business politics it's not up to them they sent me um hang on one halo legendary edition i don't know what this is it's completely unopened but it's signed by all these guys all these people over at 343. super super nice you know thanks marty for all you did for paving the way it was great to meet you it was this really nice thing that they said thrilled to get it so like it's not like i think there's a bunch of people over there saying you know how can we how can we screw this up none of us think that it's just like marcus jamie paul me joe we're not working at bungie we've been out of bungie for a long time there's there's no business strings attached we could we could just go over for a day and i wish i wish that i had some of this context prior to making that video because i felt like i could have been a little more fair because i mean again it's not even just upper management saying and you know arbitrary rules this or whatever at least with anniversary combat evolved from what i could tell uh a lot of it just seemed to be um a project that seemed doomed from the start you know like i mean they had six months to make the really when all was said and when done to go from uh reverse engineering halo to shipping the product i yeah and that was in 2010 right was that 2000 or no 2011 yeah yeah 2011. where were we yeah we were gone that was that was a destiny and there was tension between bungie yeah bungie and microsoft had a lot of tension and uh yeah to be honest with you most likely none of us who were working on destiny would have been willing and able to help out with the first version of halo anniversary and you know that's i guess that's sort of understandable you know things were too new and kind of raw but like now like another 10 years has gone by it's like hey well i i'll help you out what do you need anyway as much as we'd as much as i and many others would love that it just comes it's i mean this is what it all comes down to it's uh they already have a remaster why remaster a remaster i can i mean we know why but they won't do it yeah well i i hope that they won't squelch any of the fans who are trying to make a fan version of the original halo for pc and use what they've already made and just fix a couple of the mistakes it's like i hope they just say yeah go ahead thursday and download it there is there's some encouraging stuff going on there um the uh i've been keeping a close eye on the master chief uh collection updates and more recently um more recently they've been talking about mod support if it's a little more a little more comprehensive legal stuff keeps them i assume legal stuff keeps them from talking about details but they're in the iteration stage and it seems like they want to more actively support that kind of thing rather than squish it like they might have done in the past so that's encouraging yeah legal stuff yeah that's i hate legal stuff it doesn't make it it screws up it screws things up i mean when i see okay i'm gonna say this to you and to all the fans who might be watching this go for it i don't own the copyright on any halo music i cannot give you permission to use any halo music on anything i give you my blessing i have no problem with people using it ever but i can't give i can't even give you permission so stop asking me to give you permission i would say get have good luck use it as much as you want i don't care but i can't give you permission [Music] it's not like this has never happened before in his music especially so you know who joe cocker is maybe your dad knows i he brought he probably knows i'll ask him yeah what would you do if you fit if i sang you a tune you know he's the gravely blues guy who's saying try with a little help from my friends okay he didn't write that song that's a lennon mccartney song it's the one that you know ringo sang ringo sang a cute song called try with a little help from my friends linda mccartney were songwriters and they're like i hope somebody else in the future covers this song because as composers we're still going to make money on it joe cocker says i love this song i'm going to cover it i want to do a blues version and he's like and he does this great version and he made money on everybody can make money the cover artist the publisher the new publisher the original composers the new arrangers everybody participates this is not rocket science like there is a way of divvying this up based on people's contribution but what if i had more money though you should have more money i'm hoping you will eventually but you're only 22. you don't need money yet i'm fine but you should fight for your you should fight for what you deserve and then and people should not be taking advantage of you yeah no it's copyright is a concept copyright is an extremely touchy subject on youtube and um it's it's a nightmare for everybody i i i do mean everybody there's only one change i mean i think i i uh i've been waiting and i finally did get one of those strikes copyright strikes against something oh really shows me yeah it shows me how i could respond to it and so i responded by saying i'm the composer this is the music i wrote and then they're like oh yeah okay i mean so i finally got some human being instead of an automated stupid thing figured out what it is but frankly if the publisher the copyright owner actually wanted to do something bad to me they could i'm assuming they don't want to do that because then i'm just going to tweet about it and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people are going to be up in arms exactly that's the any that's that's that's the only time that that's how that's how things get done on youtube a lot of the time it only happens whenever people big enough make a stink about it you you want to know the kicker to that is whenever um whenever you uh whenever there's a copyright strike thing and it gets sent off if you choose to uh if you choose to say no like you did if you choose to uh fight back on that it doesn't fall onto youtube or some third party to figure out who is right it it's the company so if if you choose to look take this strike and say hey this isn't fair this isn't right um the company are the ones that get to say no we are right actually yeah that's where it is as well no with me that's not where it lands right i'll go ballistic with whoever that is and people already know i've gone ballistic with activision bungie and microsoft so um it just doesn't make sense to me these corporate overlords think that and it's not even like i'm trying to make money on it or anything else i'm actually just saying hey does any is anybody curious how like i came up with uh are you curious about that because i can tell you so what microsoft's going to say well you're not allowed to tell that story or sing that melody while you tell it really like so luckily they're not doing that they haven't done it until now hopefully they won't do it so you've spoken before about a concept you like to call emotional equity uh usually in reference to reoccurring music ideas and the impact that can have on the player but i want to explore that a little more so how would you define emotional equity and how can it be practically applied in games and other media so equity is something that you possess and emotional equity would be that some emotion has already been evoked in the player and now that emotional that emotion is now a commodity it's a possession and i can re-trigger it again because i know it already exists so if you've never heard and you were sitting in the audience at mac world in 99 and steve jobs came out on stage and said here's this new cool thing and the first thing you heard was oh and the room went dark and you hear the monks you're going to have this hopefully little memory and chill up the back of your spine and now that emotional you had that emotion you had of seeing steve jobs on stage seeing jason jones present halo seeing the room dark hearing the monks sing whatever emotion was evoked at that moment it's like a smell right it's like i remember where i was and i smelled that cotton candy i was with my grandfather at the carnival uh that's what emotional equity is so there are there are things that go right into the emotional centers of your brain that if you trigger those same elements again you will trigger that emotion so i know that the first time you hear the monk melody which is hooky whatever emotions you have the first few times you hear it i will be able to recall those emotions by doing that melody again in a new context so that's why it's equity to me it's equity to me it's like i don't have to do a new thing that says i gotta come up with a new mysterious melody i did it once it's attached to this one thing but i can attach it to another circumstance and if you've already experienced it over here and felt mysterious and a chill up your spine i'm gonna get some of that chill mysterious thing again right so it's just a tool that's all it is it's it's i hate to say it's a manipulative tool but it kind of is i know it's going to there's to a certain extent it's going to work and sometimes you can do it by juxtaposing a feeling you know in a different context or amplifying a feeling in a new context there's all sorts of ways you can work with it but the key is you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel i don't have to make a new mysterious feeling and another new mysterious feeling i um i think that is definitely something that people actively dip into especially when it comes to marketing um and sometimes that's fine um one of my favorite examples i know you don't really keep up to date with most of the new halo stuff and to a degree i try not to either but um there's a part in the infinite trailer which has a reinterpretation of some of your work in a way that just hit me so hard and and i don't think it really had any reason to because nothing that was happening on screen was particularly meaningful uh some will disagree with me on that because cortana is saying something vague about how she cares about you or something um but it because that was one of my favorite pieces of any of the scores in the past and i heard this new interpretation of it and it was paced well and there were some visuals that kind of complemented it it it still hit me just as hard and oops now i want to play halo infinite you know uh well obviously that's 100 on purpose uh i know that there's that's their goal that's what they've that's what joel yarger the music supervisor and all the creative people at 343 are telling their new composers um is yeah work with the material that sort of got us here rather than uh you know maybe rather than walking away from it which maybe didn't work as well for some of the other titles that they did um let's embrace some of those things because that's what the we know it's going to push some emotional buttons for the fans yeah and i think that's a it's a if you do that well it it it you know transcends manipulation and and just becomes something that causes everybody to rejoice that's sort of like yes this is that thing i love going home to grandma's house and smelling the turkey gravy or whatever you know it's just like yes i'm so glad i'm here um i know you you passed i knew we would be perfect together that's emotional equity to you yes okay so that's emotional so i i'm thrilled that they're using emotional equity i i read the articles about it and that's sort of like they keep talking about iconic themes and legacy themes and blah blah blah i'm sort of like well you guys realize that came from some place right what are you talking about it came from halo yeah yeah so anyway um i'm not complaining enough people well i keep pushing myself in front of people's faces so they know i'm still alive and i'm there but um i'm happy to see that these things still uh are able to push a few emotional buttons and they should use it like crazy i'm happy with that you can go so far that people don't even know you're doing it but they have this feeling that there's something familiar about it sometimes you can do it so it just triggers it and it's all that stuff is great there's a lot of that in halo 2 and 3 and even one sometimes wherever i i have these you know that's probably because i'm a dumb little i was a dumb kid but uh i think it was only a year ago that i listened to halo 1 soundtrack and realized oh this is like half of this whole soundtrack is just the other part of the soundtrack yes exactly and like i've said in other things i've done i'm lazy so it's like i'm not gonna come up with something new if i already got like well i might as well stick that melody back in here get more mileage out of it i felt like a genius but also the dumbest person ever having that realization most people don't when i looked at when i look at how hard it was for people to figure out the i would have been your daddy skull in halo 3 that then i realized like the mechanics of what goes into making music and what's in a melody and i'm like it's the only seven note melody that finishes off halo and you're finishing off halo like how hard was it to play that last seven note melody like i gave you the entire seven notes in the rings i i didn't expect all the you know seven-year-olds to figure this out or even 95 of anybody to figure it out but given a few weeks a couple of music experts and rabid halo modders and fans and whatever they would have figured this out because it just wasn't that hard of it it just wasn't that what yeah i don't i don't blame you for thinking that way i remember i remember reading a story i don't know if this was jamie or somebody else but i remember an ancient interview where they were talking about how the the the classic scarab gun was hidden away somewhere there oh yeah yeah they were thinking oh it'll be years before they find this like day three day three they found it i know i know it's so funny yeah well and we thought the halo 3 skull i would have been your daddy's goal was going to take a while we thought we were all thinking maybe a couple weeks three weeks the fact that somebody hacked the code and shared that with everybody and then my only thing then was like okay great you hacked the code if you hadn't hacked the code how would you have figured it out right that was the only challenge i ever made to anybody on my the old site the marty army i would say look it's fine just tell me how you would have figured it out all the clues are there and nobody ever did so 13 years later it's come up again and i finally somebody finally came very close to telling exactly how it was and then i decided just to fill the beans on there or nothing so fair enough and now there's those there's those i think there's glyphs and odst i'm not sure what those are someone should look into that last main question for you i i'm sure you get this constantly but halo obviously means a lot to a great many people myself included um but rather than gush about how much i love your work i think i've done enough of that i'd like to hear from you um if there is a piece of media whether it be a game movie song book whatever um what is something that isn't as important to you as a consumer as halo is for people like me like what's your halo that is a that's not something i've thought of thought about before i there are some books that i grew up reading that were very important to me chronicles of narnia super important lord of the rings super important i could see that yeah um i could see how that would translate yeah um and then i of course i ended up loving the peter jackson movies for lord of the rings um i was probably as influenced and rabidly fanboying about general giant as some people probably you know are fans of halo um [Music] but i there's no i i just don't think i was of the age uh for games i was already an adult when games were worth playing so i i don't have that sort of like i was a kid and i fell in love with something but i have some books some early movies i mean i was a huge star i was a huge star trek fan i mean i just thought star trek was amazing i mean i'm talking old star trek yeah i was i was a huge uh stanley kubrick fan as a kid so when i saw 2001 a space odyssey and i was like whatever 12 years old i was just like okay whatever this is i want to i want to do this kind of stuff yeah so that movie still holds up that's that's a tangent i'm not i'm not going to get into that all right that's amazing so uh any updates on the christmas album wow i can't believe this many this many months has gone by and i haven't done a thing on it uh come on we're getting close now we're getting close it'd be the right time i think it would be i need i think i'm gonna have to get another year it's just something i did and i i enjoyed doing silent night and i thought gee i should maybe do a bunch more christmas carols you know classic christmas carols my way and i haven't touched it so yeah i'll update fair enough well for anyone under christmas everybody yeah merry early christmas everyone um uh for anyone not aware you should check out the uh silent night i'll link it somewhere it's very nice i really like that interview you can use it you can use it right now at the end i give you i have a hundred percent right to that it's a public domain and i give you rights to use it so perfect awesome well um i'll go ahead and get to work on that i'll be honest with you i am very new to interviews and as well as i think this went the one part that i couldn't figure out is how to end them so [Music] you

Channel: Noodle

Views: 362,672

Rating: 4.9846029 out of 5

Keywords: halo, bungie, interview, highwire, marty, martin, odonnell, marty army, golem, vr, crunch, honey, audio director, sound design, halo 2, halo 3, combat evolved, anniversary, 343, industries, 343 industries, crunch culture, destiny, echoes of the first dreamer, music of the spheres, virtual reality, psvr, xbox, valve index, oculus, playstation, gaming, noodle

Id: FIQihLUW2Co

Length: 110min 39sec (6639 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Griffolian]

I’ve been loving the handful of interviews we’ve gotten out of Marty over the last few months! Great interview!