Have you listened to High Scores: Music from Gameloft Games yet?
Released in November 2021, Gameloft’s first album is a homage to all the music that has brought our games to life since the beginning of the company.
High Scores: Music From Gameloft Games was created by the Audio team at Gameloft Montréal with Decca Records US and highlights 20 years of music from some of our most popular games, such as Asphalt 9: Legends, Asphalt 8: Airborne, Gangstar New Orleans, Dungeon Hunter Champions, and more!
Vincent Labelle, Senior Music Composer, was the mastermind behind the project, and he went back in time through years of archives to create beautiful medleys that really get to the heart and soul of our games.
We spoke to Vincent to see what it was like transforming and condensing two decades of game music into a 17 track album that will undoubtedly recall many fond memories for our community.
Hi, Vincent! Tell us about yourself and your role in creating High Scores.
I’m a senior composer for the company, and I’ve been doing this since 2007. I mainly write music for our games that requires pop or electronic music, such as our Asphalt and Modern Combat franchises, but I also manage some parts of the music licensing within our games.
My task for this project was to basically put the album together from the ground up, which involved reviewing this huge catalog of in-house music and spending hours editing it into something that would ultimately translate into an album.
What did you set out to do with High Scores?
We started with the idea of showcasing music from our most popular games from the last two decades as a way of celebrating Gameloft’s 20th anniversary. We had an opportunity to work with Decca Records, and their participation made this project possible because they provided the infrastructure and support we needed to get our music out on all streaming platforms.
We wanted to cover a lot of the game music, but there is only so much we can fit in an album! For example, Gameloft released 37 games in 2011 alone, so imagine that over 20 years! Obviously we had to narrow our options and picked among the most popular franchises from the company.
We condensed most of them into 17 short medleys that highlight the best moments in each game’s soundtrack. They’re byte-sized experiences that celebrate not only the games but also the talent and people involved in making such inspired music for them.
It’s also our first official presence on music streaming platforms, so we wanted to package it with a bit of everything to allow our players to discover or rediscover the music from games they loved.
How did you create these new medleys?
Dealing with the enormous amount of music was quite the venture! We are talking about thousands of music tracks across hundreds of hour-long scores, and difficult choices had to be made.
Another challenge was the format. Since the music was made for games, it wasn’t in a format that would translate well directly on to an album.
Typically, game music is made of musical blocks that each serve a specific function in the game, like banks of explorative ambient music, upbeat combat music, or rewarding musical jingles. The game code mixes the music interactively to enhance the player’s emotions during gameplay, so listening to the raw music tracks is a completely different experience because they usually lack the structure and various nuances we enjoy on album music.
For example, most don’t typically have intros or finales, so a good part of the process was editing the raw songs to make new ones out of them somehow. It was like putting the pieces of a puzzle together without knowing what the final picture was!
What was your favorite track to work on?
I would say the opening track. For me it’s the most original and the one that best summarizes the whole evolution of mobile audio throughout the last two decades.
In this case, we took the main themes of some of our classics—Dungeon Quest, Brain Challenge, and Blockbreaker Deluxe—and mixed them up together to create a unique mashup. For extra 2007 nostalgia, we made it sound like it was playing out of a Sony Eriksson phone by capturing its actual frequency response curve!
From a musical standpoint, it’s an interesting way to blend the elements from those radically different songs and have them evolve through time together.
What did you enjoy most about working on this project?
Taking the time to listen to this awesome library of music because the amount of work and passion in there is simply astounding!
The Gameloft Audio team is an amazing talented pool of passionate people. Most of us have been making music and sounds together for more than 15 years, and it was an honor to be able to highlight such great music and the people behind it.
Now that the project is done, I’m also quite proud of how it unraveled overall, and I really hope people will like it just as much as I did doing it.
High Scores: Music from Gameloft Games was a huge labor of love that combines all the great music our composers have created throughout the years. Even though we weren’t able to include everything, we’re sure everyone—old and new players alike—will find something they love!
Download and stream High Scores from your favorite streaming service, and learn more about Gameloft’s Music and Audio team on YouTube! Stay tuned for another edition of the Gameloft Bulletin!
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