Ah, the early stages of a war game. The mood is optimistic. We haven’t yet heard the blood-curdling screams of onscreen avatars (and real-life players). For the civilization-selection phase of Empires Apart I wanted the music to feel expansive, forward-looking, and a bit mysterious. The second half of the cue is a positive spin on an arching melody that will reemerge, in more dire form, in later battle music.

The title above is a bit of a cheat, since in Empires Apart this music represents all meso-American cultures rather than strictly the Aztecs. (Tenochtitlan was the famed Aztec capitol, constructed on Lake Texcoco.)

This battle cue uses percussion and winds to evoke a sense of location, and orchestral strings for continuity with the game’s overall narrative.

Empires Apart, launching this month, is a real-time strategy game that revisits the genre with beautiful stylized visuals.

RTS games start peacefully, as the player begins constructing a town in a relatively unsettled natural environment, then pass through phases I call “bustling society” and finally “all out carnage” as other players get involved.

I wrote this track to accompany early gameplay for players who opt to participate as the French. The music draws from European folk traditions and makes use of instruments such as the mandolin and dulcimer.

Sometimes the flow of a film requires a very short musical cue. These are surprisingly tricky to write. An entire scene may be emotionally defined by one musical phrase, which creates pressure to come up the exact right one from countless possibilities.

Usually when writing micro-cues I reprise a fragment of existing musical material. However, for the moody driving scene from the film Craving Greatness I came up with a standalone theme just for that moment. In retrospect, I wish I could have made it longer!