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 COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS 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. “I don’t think I’d played every game, but I definitely had played Metal Gear Solid 2, that was the big one. It’s this combination of Christopherson’s work and PlatinumGames’ mixing that make Revengeance’s music still a joy to explore today, almost a decade later.Įvery title in the Metal Gear Solid franchise has had original vocal tracks, so going into Revengeance Christopherson saw the lineage of songs like ‘ Snake Eater’ and ‘ Can’t Say Goodbye To Yesterday’ as quite intimidating, but that this was something he quickly overcame when learning about this new, action-focused take on the series. So this means PlatinumGames was the one to implement Christopherson’s work in thematically interesting ways, like cutting the lyrics during the Jetstream Sam boss fight, as if to represent his inner thoughts being overtaken by concentration. “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.
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