A blind audition, a fruitful collaboration, a tense creative fallout: composer Jack Wall’s journey through the Mass Effect universe was as epic as the player’s
Mass Effect is some of the best science fiction ever made. That may sound like a grandiose comment, but it’s true. As a trilogy, the original games from 2007-2013 effortlessly plucked the most cerebral ideas from the sci-fi genre and slotted them into a memorable military role-playing game that had players invested from beginning to controversial end.
Whether you prefer the hopeful, optimistic outlook of Asimov, the dark and reflective commentary of Shelley, the accessible thought experiments of Star Trek, or the arch melodrama of Battlestar Galactica, Mass Effect has it all. The trilogy is as happy grazing on the western-inspired tropes of Star Wars as the “hard” sci-fi of Iain M Banks, blending all its moods and micro-stories into a compelling, believable galaxy that somehow walks a line between breathless optimism and suffocating bleakness.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
Why Mass Effect is some of the best sci-fi ever made
Read more
Mass Effect is special. And like any successful video game series, the achievement of the franchise rests on the shoulders of a huge assembly of developers. BioWare project director Casey Hudson and the studio’s co-founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, get a lot of the credit, but so much of its soul comes from BioWare’s other creatives, too. The writing of Drew Karpyshyn, the art direction of Derek Watts, the vision of lead designer Preston Watamaniuk … and the soaring, cinematic music of Jack Wall.
Every second you play you can feel the suffocating inevitability of sacrifice closing in around you. It needed music to match
“I had made a soundtrack for Jade Empire very successfully with BioWare before Mass Effect,” Wall tells me, when I ask how he became part of the team working on the original title. “Then, they put out an audition process for what the team was calling SFX, the codename for Mass Effect. It was a blind audition, and BioWare got the files back from a number of composers. The team would listen to all those different things and decide who nailed it the most for the tone or the feeling they were picturing. And I won that audition blind.”
Almost immediately, Casey Hudson got to work on giving Wall the brief. “His mandate was ‘I want this to sound like 80s sci-fi music’. No Star Wars, nothing like that, more like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Blade Runner. Those were the main ideas.” Hudson specifically wanted to channel that vintage analogue synth sound that defined the science fiction of the era (especially in movies) and imagined the multilayered, multitextured approach from Tangerine Dream as the perfect accompaniment to the dense and complex Mass Effect universe.
This track, aptly named Suicide Mission, may be the most important across the whole trilogy. It has a more orchestral bias than anything from the first game, and reflects the serious overall tone. It shows how rapidly Mass Effect matured from one game to the next.
“It had to be epic, it had to feel cinematic, it had to feel ‘one man against everything’,” says Wall. “You needed to feel like you were saving the world, saving the galaxy, whatever. I came up with that main theme, and [Hudson] liked it pretty much immediately.”
But before Wall and Hudson could start fitting the pieces together, there was some maintenance to be done. BioWare and Wall were unimpressed by how the music in the first game had been patched into the final product. “The transitions were terrible,” Wall says when I ask for examples, “and it just didn’t do justice to the music.
“So, what we decided is that in Mass Effect 2, I would do all the implementation, which was something I’d never done before,” he continues. “I had an amazing assistant called Brian DiDomenico who worked with me in my studio every day; he sat in my vocal booth with a desk and a PC, and I would send him my tracks, he would implement them into the game, and I would do a play test there and then. And we would tweak it until it was really good … BioWare was known for only putting out a game when it was ready, and so things got delayed a lot, but fans were super happy when they got it.”
Wall remembers finishing the game, noting that the whole ending sequence came through “in little tiny pieces of video that were spewed out by the game engine”. He took the files and fed them into a movie editor on his Mac, pieced the ending together, and edited Suicide Mission into it. He then wrote different endings to the track, reflecting the choices of the player.
“It was the biggest mind-fucking thing I’ve ever done in my entire life,” he laughs. “And there was no one available to walk me through it, because they were all freaking out trying to finish the game. I handed it in, and they had to do a lot of massaging on their end in order to get it to work, but they did it … and the result is still one of the best ending sequences to a game that I’ve ever played. It was worth all that effort.”
Wall did not return to score Mass Effect 3, the least well-received game in the trilogy. “Casey was not particularly happy with me at the end,” he says. “But I’m so proud of that score. It got nominated for a Bafta, and it did really well … [even if] it didn’t go as well as Casey wanted.” Talking to Wall, I sensing an almost Fleetwood Mac level of creative tension between him and Hudson; the duo made something amazing that would live in the hearts of sci-fi and RPG lovers for ever, but at the cost of some relationships.
“Fallouts like that happen, it’s just part of the deal,” he says. “It’s one of the few times in my career that’s happened, and it was a tough time, but it is what it is.”
Mass Effect 2’s final mission can be survived. If you make all the right choices, and execute the plan with absolute lucidity and determination, you can save your main character and all of the crew as they stare certain death in the eye. But the much more likely result, at least for most players, is that you lose at least one member of the team. This ragtag bunch of heroes becomes splintered, and limps into the climax of the series wounded, demoralised and desperate. To me, it’s a reflection of the brutal reality that good sci-fi reveals – a dramatic, honest look at the best and worst of human nature.
