It’s a bit of a joke to name a cue “final victory”, given that everything from computer games to wildlife documentaries invariably features a piece of music by that name. This particular final victory comes from Empire Earth II; it opens with the themes for the American region (or “faction”, to use contemporary parlance) which is combined contrapuntally with the game’s overall central theme, connecting the particular wrapped-up mission with a sense of the game as a whole.

I’m a big fan of the dramatic pause as a musical technique, and not just because the wind players inevitably complain if you don’t get them a chance to breathe. In endings like this one, I imagine a hypothetical narrator speaking a final word of a monologue in the gap left in the music – even though in this case there’s no actual voice-over.

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	Final Victory

This cue is the romance theme (now there’s a term you don’t seem to hear in film score descriptions any more!) from the film The F-Zone. I was beyond thrilled to have wind virtuoso Jon Clarke in my orchestra, having admired his oboe performances in Thomas Newman’s scores, and couldn’t help but write him a solo here. (I can’t quite tell if this is the oboe or the rarer oboe d’amore.)

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	Dennis and Lauren

A few months prior to starting work on Empire Earth 3, I composed a few preliminary music cues to help establish the overall artistic direction for the score. These were free-form pieces inspired only by my imagination of what gameplay might be like; they were especially fun to write because they were so unconstrained.

At the same time, I had to maintain a certain balance between between musical interest and unobtrusiveness. A gameplayer, unlike a moviegoer, may potentially have to sit through the same music four hours on end. And more to the point, he or she also has access to an options screen with a “mute the music” button. A score needs to offer both artistic enjoyment and extreme re-listenability if it’s going to survive in such a capricious environment!

Here’s one of my “prototype cues”, meant to evoke scurrying woodcutters and other inhabitants of a forest settlement.

(Click on the play button to stream, or the cue title to download.)

	The Industrious Villagers