First, some bad news for Mass Effect fans. Jack Wall, Video Games Live! proprietor and composer of the first two Mass Effect scores, won’t be returning to write music for the final game in the trilogy.
The good news? Requiem For a Dream and The Fountain composer Clint Mansell will be replacing him.
Along with the underrated work of Sam Hulick, Jack Wall’s score played a crucial role in texturing the Mass Effect universe, so it’s unfortunate that he won’t be rounding out the trilogy… but it’s hard to complain about the franchise landing the gifted Mansell. Here’s what the former Pop Will Eat Itself frontman had to say about scoring his first game:
“As I was saying about Public Enemy and re-working old hip-hop tunes for Requiem, and kind of re-working old ballet tunes for Black Swan, with something like Mass Effect you’re more like a DJ, with all these elements. You’ve got the holding pattern, then the big explosion where you need the score to kick in. Then you need to take it off on a tangent. You’ve got all these different elements that change depending on what the player does. You have to figure out an overall symphony, but be able to break it down into component parts. You can bring the pain when required.”
By now, everybody knows about Mansell’s Two Towers trailer orchestration. Check out Dead Reckoning from the Smokin’ Aces score for a taste of Mansell at his most Mass-Effect-y:
Source: The Quietus via Badassdigest
5 comments
I may not have played any of these games, but I do appreciate the title of this article. Nicely done.
Thanks! It was originally titled MASS TO MASS, but I made a last minute appeal to my better angels.
Not sure how I feel about this. I love Jack Wall’s score, but at the same time, Clint Mansell can do no wrong (unless you’re the Academy). Video game scores and film scores are two different animals, but if anyone can pull it off, it’d be Mansell. “Mass Effect 3” is probably my most anticipated game already, anyway.
Does anyone know why Jack Wall isn’t doing it?
Not exactly but here’s what he had to say about it:
Dear People Who Love Mass Effect –
So…maybe it’s time to actually say something?
Working on the Mass Effect series was epic. It was mind-bending, soul-coughing, astral-plane traveling delicious loveliness – all the way. The games themselves are works of art. I wouldn’t change one note of it that myself, Sam, David, Richard or Jimmy wrote. As you may have noticed by now, I am not returning to score the final game. The reasons are much too complicated to explain here, but suffice to say that the people at BioWare and I are still friends and we all really still like each other a lot. More importantly, the score for ME3 will be great and even more important than that, the game will liikely be (being BioWare and all) super duper fantastic.
Clint Mansell is cool. Enjoy.
Oh and thanks to everyone for the kind words here and over the years. For those of you who didn’t say nice things, that’s cool too. I’m still searching for the perfect chord. If you guys see it laying around, let me know, ok?
See you in another game in another crazy universe!
-Jack
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