Metal gear rising revengeance composer series#

“Someone sent me an email a year ago saying “have you seen all these memes?” and it’s kind of just piqued my interest to see what it’s all about. Character quotes ( especially from Senator Armstrong), music remixes, and fan-dubbed cutscene videos have seen Revengeance’s Steam player count rise dramatically in the last few months.Ĭhristopherson is aware of all this, calling it “a little strange and surreal,” though he’s ultimately impressed and happy to see the game back in the spotlight. The main reason Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is back in the public consciousness is undoubtedly the memes. That’s a key to why they’ve also lasted long, because of the melody, a strong melody can kind of stick with you.” “You can play them on the piano or in 8-bit, or even in a Nintendo style and the song still comes through. So the compositions of these songs, even though they’re very hardcore, and driving, the melody is still there,” said Chrisopherson. Each and every track doesn’t get lost in the mix either, and Christopherson says that’s because of his conscious choice regarding melody. Opening track ‘ Rules Of Nature’ is incredibly heavy, whilst songs like ‘ The Stains Of Time’ rely on synthesised sounds, and yet everything blends together in a cohesive way. “Like you got the Metallica metal, and Rammstein was an influence for the Sundowner fight, for example.” “We talked about giving different bosses different types of metal sounds,” added Christopherson. This is why Revengeance takes multiple swings at different aspects of the metal genre, with orchestral and electronic influences permeating the soundtrack.

Metal gear rising revengeance composer series#

But as we got into the project, I realised that this is a totally different game and it wasn’t going to have to compete with where the main series was going and just be just totally separate.” “I was a little daunted at first, about having that history of huge, iconic music, and an iconic game series. “PlatinumGames made sure the lyrics would kick in at the height of the boss battles,” explained Christopherson. “They used a game audio engine called Wwise.”Īs noted in this PlatinumGames article, this means the studio itself was responsible for how each part of Christopherson’s work came through during boss fights. “PlatinumGames should get all the credit,” said Christopherson. Whilst Christopherson was in charge of Revengeance’s soundtrack, it was PlatinumGames who was in charge of mixing and layering Christopherson’s stems (the individual instruments and melodies of a track) into the final product. In some ways, they’re very poignant and meaningful, and in another way they’re meaningless.

“It’s fun to see different people interpret what we wrote in different ways, because that was kind of the point of the game, and then the lyrics can be interpreted differently too, depending on who’s playing or reading it.

“There’s a duality in the lyrics just like how the game discusses the duality of war, right? We tried to leave it up to interpretation and have multiple meanings,” Christopherson told me. Revengeance was unique at the time, and still is, for how it used lyrics in boss fights to reflect each opponent’s inner thoughts, providing the fast-paced game with not just a kick-ass metal soundtrack, but a way to expand on its seemingly one-dimensional characters. So, the lyrics are very kind of fanciful and poetic in a way.”

“While I did want it to be specific to that boss, I also wanted it to be left to interpretation a little bit. “We wanted to get the character of the bosses into the songs,” explained Christopherson. NME sat down with Christopherson to ask all about the iconic game’s revitalisation, and how its music came to be in the first place. To live up to Revengeance’s frankly bat-shit story, characters and premise, developer PlatinumGames wanted each boss to have their own lyrical track, so the studio enlisted composer Jamie Christopherson – who’d previously worked on a number of games for Capcom – to define the game’s sound. READ MORE: How Metal Gear Solid’s timeless yarn raised the standard for video game storytelling.Outliving its initial release in 2013, Revengeance is back in the collective consciousness and bringing with it over-the-top dialogue, colossal story beats, slice-and-dice action, and an incredible soundtrack that really puts the “Metal” into Metal Gear Solid. If you’ve seen a cyborg attempting to beat the shit out of an American senator recently, then you’ve been exposed to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance.