Develop: Sound and Vision

Richard Jacques' career in games began when he joined SEGA Europe as an in-house composer, where he created music for titles such as Sonic R, Jet Set Radio, Metropolis Street Racing and Headhunter.

He became the first videogame composer to secure a major budget for a live symphony orchestra and the first Western composer to have his game soundtracks released commercially in both Japan and Europe.

He has received numerous awards, including the Game Audio Network Guild Recognition Award, and many nominations. Current projects include The Club and Eight Days.

This week he will speak at the Develop conference in Brighton, delivering a talk entitled 'Music for the Masses: A next-gen composition and production masterclass'. GamesIndustry.biz talked to Jacques to find out more about his talk and about the lessons he's learned over the years.

Richard Jacques: The audio track's fantastic for audio guys, but people like myself really need to be opening up dialogue with producers, game designers, people on the business side.

So we've got a half an hour slot on the Wednesday where it's myself, John Broomhall - who's running the audio track - one of my sound designers and hopefully a game designer from Sony.

It's going to be very basic, non-technical, opening up discussion with the producers about how real, triple-A quality audio is produced these days, what they should be budgeting money wise and how much time. It should be a good session.

Then on the Thursday I'm doing a talk about a lot of the high-end production techniques I use, giving hints and tips to other composers about how I do interactive music.

I think I'm getting well known for doing big productions and high quality recordings, so it's about sharing a few ideas and how I do things. Then I'm going to take a look at some of my current projects - I'll be playing a bit of music from The Club, a little bit from Crossfire and maybe showing a few other bits and bobs.

Most composers are finding out that time is an absolutely crucial thing these days. In general, we're not being brought on to the project in enough time.

Just as graphics have changed in the last generation so have music and audio, and I think we really need to get that message across - bring us on to the project earlier.

Even if we finish the product early that's fine. Once we're on earlier, we can really get into the interactive music side of things, because that is very, very time consuming. So that's a really strong message we need to get across for everyone concerned.

But also, just stepping up to the plate in terms of quality. I'm in touch with what's happening in the States, in Japan, across Europe; I know who's doing what and there's an amazing quality there, not just music and audio but games in general.

I think we've lost our way a little bit. In the UK there have been lots of changes with developers going down and new ones coming up, so it's really a question of educating people about real, high quality work.

It varies from company to company. In the past, it was seen as, 'Oh, we'll get the musician in for the last three months of the title.' Which would suffice going back to PlayStation 1 era but nowadays, with PS3, 360 and the modern generation of PCs, there's a lot of very complicated work that goes on under the hood.

When we're talking about actually implementing the music into the game and reacting to the player's movements - that is the really time consuming part. The technology needs to be thought about pretty much from day one.

We've got to get away from this approach of just plugging the music in at the end, because there's still a bit of that mentality going on these days. I get phone calls about projects and I say, 'When's the deadline,' and they say one or two months. I've got a project next year that's at least a nine month job for me because it's really that complex.

It doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot more, but if the composer can schedule out when they're going to create tracks, work on implementation, work with the programmers - that needs to be done from a pretty early stage.

Once the game design is locked down and there's prototyping going on, there's no reason why people can't engage in discussion with a composer - at least to narrow down a style.

It's a shame that some composers are given such a short amount of time they can't experiment and try to define a style for that game. People are relying on, 'Please make it generic, please make it sound like this movie or that movie' - well, as a creative industry, we're not going to move forward unless we have that gestation period.

Yes, that's still happening. It does vary from publisher to publisher. Sony is very clued up on audio in general, as is Microsoft, but for some of the smaller publishers and developers it does take second place.

It's about getting through to people that it doesn't necessarily have to be expensive, but you have to think about it carefully. Spielberg has said that 50 per cent of the entertainment value in his films is music, so he treats it very seriously.

You play any videogame and take the music away and it takes the soul out of it. It's good to see a lot of people taking it seriously; we're just trying to get that standardised across the board.

And hopefully another 15 to come. I'm still loving every minute of it, I'm finding great pleasure in it every day, so no plans to stop yet.

It is very tough these days, there's no doubt about it. I'd hate to be starting off, trying to get into the industry now. People need to be prepared for the competition.

The thing I always say to wannabe games composers is that they've got to have really high quality musical training. It's not enough any more, being realistic, to just have a PC and know a little bit about some software.

Myself and a lot of composers in the videogame business have been to music college, I've got five grade A distinctions on various instruments et cetera. It's a question of having the real basics of music - music theory, music harmony, music history - a really solid musical training.

I'm not a massive fan personally of composers that look down on the games industry. A lot of people working in the business say to me, 'I just want to write TV and film music,' and my answer to that is, 'Go and do it then.'

You have to look at games in a different way because of the technology involved and the challenges it presents. We're working in an interactive medium, and there are so many avenues we can explore there. We haven't even got to 10 per cent of what could be done.