|1-AN INTERVIEW WITH BJORN A.LYNNE |1-AKA DR.AWESOME! By WoOkiE/Carnage The following interview was conducted by me during November of 1995. I visited the Team 17 offices and was given a tour by Bjorn. This interview forms a part of my degree course, but I thought you might find it interesting as well. How did you get started in the industry? I bought an Amiga very early on just to play games on. I then noticed that it was possible to make music on this computer, so I started to write my own using the very first music packages, such as Sonix, and then onto SoundTracker. I remember when the first SoundTracker came out. I continued to make music. A few years later on I got in touch with a few different software companies, and I started doing some small jobs for them, working as a freelancer. Over the years, I did more and more freelance work, and when Team 17 wanted a full-time musician, at the beginning of 1995, they asked me. I had already done stuff for them as a freelancer. What is different about your job now compared to a few years ago? Are you doing more work now than you were then? Yes. There is much more music in each game now. In a typical game a couple of years ago, you had a song for the title screen, and maybe two or three small, simple tunes in the game. But these days writing music for a game is a massive project. I will end up doing anything from thirty minutes to several hours of music for a game. We have just released the game Worms, and on the CD-ROM version there is about forty minutes of CD-Music. CD-ROM technology can do that now. There is all this storage space, and they want to use it for music. Another game we are writing at the moment is called Witchwood. I am actually writing different songs for different scenes in the game, different locations and areas, and that adds up to more than forty different songs, each maybe four or five minutes long. In all that is about four hours of music just for that game. At what stage in a project do you get involved? Too late most of the time. I am trying to talk people into getting me involved with the projects much earlier. Is that because you want to have a creative input on a project? Yeah. First of all I would like to avoid this terrible stress I have right at the very end of a project, but also because I would like to be a part of the overall design of the game. But this is a problem that has been fixed in people's minds since a couple of years ago. Back then it was OK to design the game, write the game, Finish the game, and then stuff the music in later. It only took a day or two. These days every stage of the game has different music, so it is much more important for me now to get involved with the design of the game much earlier. How many projects do you work on a year? Well I have only been here for about eight months. So far I have done about seven games, including the ones I am doing right now. There is quite a lot of music to be done. In the time that I have been here I have done about ten to twelve hours of music, possibly more. Where do you draw your inspiration? Everywhere, everything I listen to. I listen to everything from rock, rave, soul, jazz, folk, to classical. It is important for me to try to listen to lots of different music, and not to get stuck in one category of music. Too many young musicians end up just writing one type of music, which at the moment seems to be house/rave/techno stuff. That is fine, but I think it is important to listen to other things as well. If you spend two or three years writing on one style there is a danger you will be stuck there. So you feel comfortable writing music in any style? Oh yeah. Just a couple of days ago I was asked to write a jazz/blues tune for a night-club scene in a game. It was for a 1920's or 1930's Chicago scene. You just cannot have a techno tune in that sort of scene. Do you find that deadlines impair your creativity? It has not been a big problem so far. Usually the games are always delayed anyway. I am usually finished with the music before a game has gone through play-testing and final testing. I've learned that if they say they need the music by a certain date, I know that they don't really mean it! There are always delays. Out of interest, what date did you finish the music for Worms? I had the music for Worms finished in July. I have been tweaking it since though. They have been tweaking the game. Some stuff has been taken out, some new stuff has been added. As far as I am concerned I was finished with Worms in July. Are you satisfied with all your past work? You know how it is. When you get more experienced and better, you listen to your old stuff and you do not think it is that good really! It is that way with me. I listen to my old stuff now and I don't think it is all that good. I think that is just the way it is. You just get better. But I suppose you could say that is was your old stuff that got you the job in the first place. Yeah, I guess. It is just that if I made these old tunes now I wouldn't think they were any good. If you had to write them now would you do it in a different way? Probably! How do you think the industry will change in the next five years? I think making music for a game will be more like making music for a film. Technology is moving forward, and people expect more and more CD-Quality music in a game now. They expect games to sound like a movie. They do not expect the bleeps and blips anymore. They want full orchestral scores with massive sounds, and real instruments and vocals. Does that present you with a problem? That will only mean that all the software companies will have to employ musicians instead of someone who can put together a four-track computer tune. It takes someone with more experience to work with real scores and professional sound equipment. You have seen some of the actors making appearances in computer games, such as Mark Hamill in the Wing Commander series. I have even heard that a composer who previously worked on films is now writing for multimedia applications and computer games. I think all the software and entertainment companies will have to employ proper musicians. It is already happening. Over the past year or so four or five of my friends have got jobs in this industry. What aspect of your job to you find most enjoyable? When you have been working on a piece of music and you hear it inside the actual game. You can sit any play the game and hear your own music, and that is very enjoyable. You see the result of what you have done. What about the composing stage? I enjoy that as well. That is why I am doing this. I love this work. I would not be composing music for a living if I did not enjoy it. Do ever find that you get writers' block? I get writers' block, but if I do there is always a lot of technical stuff to be done as well. You have to convert a song to this and that format, you have to sample stuff, and you have to put stuff together. There are a lot of technical aspects to this job. Some days I just cannot think of anything, or I cannot compose, but there is always a need to convert pieces to other formats, or to compress a song down in size. So there are always things to be done even if you are not being creative that day. What equipment do you use? All this stuff ( Bjorn gestures towards his large sound rack ). Is your set-up synthesiser or sampler based? In this set-up I have both synthesisers and samplers. I think it is important to keep a balance there. Is this equipment your own, or was it provided by Team 17? Bits of both actually. They have recently purchased an ADAT, which is an 8-Track digital recorder. Everything is mastered onto DAT. I never record anything onto analogue recorders. Are you only person who uses this equipment? Yes. I am the only one who uses it. So you do the sound for the whole company? Yeah, except if we do a deal with an independent programming team, and we just publish the game. They will probably do the music as well. But everything that is developed here by Team 17 themselves I will do the music for. Are you excited by the possibilities presented by the next generation consoles? Oh yeah, I like them. I am able to make the games sound great. The PlayStation stuff can sound like a proper CD. This means that I can use all my sound gear and make the music sound really good. So when I have to go back now to something like General MIDI or Ad-lib, it feels terrible because I have been working with stuff for the PlayStation which sounds smashing, a real CD soundtrack and everything. So you write music in a number of versions? Yeah, I've been through everything! I started with the Amiga. But even the four-track Amiga music sounds good compared to some of the stuff I have to do on the PC. Some of the stuff I have to do on PC is just FM sounds, which are synthetically generated. At least on the Amiga you can sample your own custom instruments, so at least you have that. What is your opinion on the sound specifications of the next generation consoles? Do you think they have everything you could ever need? No! There is still room for much more. These new consoles can play 16-bit sound, but they only have so much RAM. The PlayStation has 512k for sampling which is not a lot at all. Also, if you use a lot of musical effects it puts a lot of strain on the CPU So there is still room for improvement. The first thing they could do is multiply by ten the amount of RAM you have available for samples. Continued in pt 2...