Bungie, LLC

The most disturbing environment in Halo: Reach

is one you'll never find. It's stark and absurd: a cavernous stone passage that seems to extend forever, flanked on one side with brackish green water, populated with disembodied air-lock doors, grounded aircraft and hot-pink bands running across the floor, walls and ceiling.

In his combined office and recording studio in Bungie's Kirkland, Wash., offices, Audio Director Marty O'Donnell taps at a keyboard and, in Matrix-esque fashion, a purple alien attack craft dumps into the virtual space. He tosses a grenade at the Banshee and, as he explains that there are 13 separate sound effects triggered here, the explosion bangs against the craft, which rocks in place, sheds fuselage and sizzles. Then, all 13 effects roll down across the computer monitor as individual text markers.

If he were to reposition the Banshee a few yards away, at least one of these effects would be different, since each band—whether pink, green or slate-gray—represents a different kind of terrain. Like an arena for audio, every in-game sound can and will be pitted against each other in the Audio Test Room, or the "stripey" room, as O'Donnell calls it.

This peek behind the curtain of one of the biggest games of the year—and Bungie's final installment in the studio's blockbuster Halo series (due Sept. 14 for the Xbox 360)—is an education in the state of the art in video-game audio. But a cascade of overlapping sound effects is not why Halo: Reach is the most anticipated game of the year. Back in the tunnel, O'Donnell taps another key, and the music comes in—an intricate, orchestral arrangement of strings, piano and drums. Halo's music score, as iconic as anything found in gaming, film or TV, is stronger than ever. But it takes a certain kind of studio to appreciate how air-bursting detonations can mingle with mournful cello chords.

Although the evolution of video-game music boasts as many technical milestones and breakthroughs as any other aspect of gaming, it is overlooked by players, critics and even much of the industry. Here's a challenge: Try to remember any piece of game music after the 8-bit era. The Super Mario Bros. score might have produced one of the most recognizable melodies, but for close to two decades, as the music itself became more complex, eventually resembling actual instruments, nothing stood out. By 1999, Marty O'Donnell, who writes jingles ("I'm a Flintstones Kid" is probably his biggest claim to fame) and scores music for everything from ABC News to an educational film about drunk driving, was asked to help whip up a demo for MacWorld. Halo was far from being finished, but Bungie had the opportunity to present the game at the conference, in front of Steve Jobs and the world (or a specific, tech-savvy segment of it). O'Donnell had recently joined the studio as audio director, which meant he was in charge of everything from sound effects to music. The challenge of creating sound effects worthy of an auditorium in time for the show was considerable. "So I said, Let me do a score for it. We'll just blow out the walls, with the orchestra, with the monks," O'Donnell says. "I wasn't thinking about what the game would sound like. For that three-minute little demo that was really scored, I thought it wouldn't really sound like a game. It would sound really serious."

Although a handful of games had incorporated orchestras before, Halo's mix of haunting Gregorian chants and string-section bravado was unlike anything in the industry. It was memorable. A year after the demo, when O'Donnell sat down to score the finished game, he realized the chants and the percussion and the strings were there to stay, not as tinkly background music, but as a major part of the game's identity, as instantly recognizable as the franchise's central hero, Master Chief. Here's how important the music is: In all of the Halo games to date, Bungie has left out the option to turn the music off. That's almost unheard of for video games, and for Xbox and Xbox 360 games, giving players control of the music, as well as the relative volume of dialogue and sound effects, is a technical accreditation requirement. Microsoft will waive the requirement, but only with good reason, and not very often.

O'Donnell hopes that the fact that most Halo players probably don't know that the music is immutable means that he's doing his job. "I always felt that I'll do my best shot at mixing this so you don't have to think about it. If you happen to be in the habit of always turning off music, that's fine, but giving you that control is like preparing a gourmet meal and putting salt, pepper and ketchup on the table," O'Donnell says. In the beginning, with the full weight of Microsoft behind Bungie, O'Donnell and his composing partner, Michael Salvatori, had an impressive kitchen to work with. On the hardware side, the Xbox was capable of hi-fidelity audio rivaling the best PC sound cards. And since there was no modifying the console's components, the results were consistent. Then there was the software, Halo's adaptive scoring system, which could trigger multiple layers of music, transitioning between them based on whether a player was retreating, pushing forward or had cleared a given group of enemies. Still, O'Donnell's self-imposed challenge was to keep the score from becoming annoying—or predictable. Nearly every trigger was set up with a delay, so a given layer of combat music might kick in 10 seconds after you've opened fire, or fade out 30 seconds after everyone is dead.

Anyone who's played a lot of first-person shooters knows how rare it is for the music to work on all of those levels, and how often it completely fails. A sudden driving beat will telegraph an ambush long before it's sprung, or an adrenalizing score will loop until you turn it off. With Halo: Reach, O'Donnell has more tools at his disposal—whereas the first Halo could barely manage more than two layers of music at once, Reach can run seven layers at once, coordinating which ones fade in and out based on relatively minor changes in the player's behavior. But as in all the previous installments, the music in Reach always has a time limit. That wailing guitar riff that came in during the height of a skirmish will cut out pretty quickly, but if you get pinned down behind cover for long enough, every instrument goes silent. That's a last-ditch feature, and a score that drops out, or never builds to a real crescendo, could mean you're progressing too quickly, too slowly, or that you're playing on Legendary difficulty. O'Donnell claims that the score is paced for a player running through the game's campaign on the Heroic difficulty, which is one step above the default but one below Legendary. One of the few technical features that's eluded O'Donnell so far: allowing players to turn off the music once they've beat the game, which is when most gamers might retry it on Legendary. As that means they've finished the gourmet meal as prepared, they have earned the right to drown it in ketchup.

Since Reach is the last Halo game Bungie plans to make (Microsoft can continue the franchise with other studios), players will have to trust O'Donnell, and his stripey room, to continue dishing out high-end audio. Even in the decade since the first Halo, no game or franchise has a score that's as memorable—only Grand Theft Auto's soundtracks of real songs, particularly in the '80s-themed Vice City installment, come close. For Reach, O'Donnell has more at his disposal, but he claims that the audio is not revolutionary or game-changing. That was Halo's moment, a lightning-in-a-bottle convergence of cram-session composition, console-standard 5.1 Dolby surround sound and medieval chanting. For Reach, the emphasis is on capturing the wildly different tone of the game. "I want it to be more visceral," O'Donnell says, "to have a bigger sense of loss, a personal feeling of sacrifice."

What may be Halo's biggest audio innovation is O'Donnell himself, or rather the position of audio director. He's not the guy who wrote the music and handed it off to the executive producer. O'Donnell spends months in the stripey room, checking and tweaking the mix of score and effects, listening to the rattle of fragmentation grenades against the band that represents wood, then the one that's rubber, and making sure the muffled thump of an underwater explosion isn't lost in one of the countless overlapping layers of music. It's a role that doesn't even exist in the film world, where the final audio mix usually falls to the director and editor. From what I heard in O'Donnell's office, Reach's audio is just as painstakingly curated as the rest of the series. The adaptive scoring is more sophisticated, there are more layers to trigger and the variety of sound effects is industry-leading. That's the easy part. What's harder to understand is why Halo's music, the soundtrack of a sci-fi war, is so consistently refined, particularly when compared to other games.

O'Donnell wants me to see the markers for the three separate sounds generated by ejected assault-rifle casings. And when the strings kick in, as they inevitably do, the clatter of shell casings on stone never sounded so classy.

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