Scoring the Resistance: Interview with the Composers of "Resistance: Burning Skies"

The Resistance series has always done a great job of presenting an alternate version of World War 2, where an alien invasion poses the real threat and humanity is on the brink of being overrun. But it wouldn't be nearly as effective without an amazing score.

That's were Jason Graves and Kevin Riepl come in. The two composers have been jointly tasked with creating an emotionally charged soundtrack for the upcoming Resistance: Burning Skies, which hits shelves next week.

The game follows a lone man as he searches for his family in the midst of the Chimeran invasion of the United States' eastern seaboard. There's bound to be plenty of jarring scenery, especially for us New Yorkers, and Graves and Riepl set out to make an appropriately epic score. From what I've heard, they've succeeded.

Graves's previous work includes the soundtrack for Dead Space 2, while Riepl composed the score for Gears of War. Both of those games influenced their work on Resistance: Burning Skies.

"Dead Space needs to have that atmosphere and that tension to kind of build up before something attacks you," Graves said. "I know everyone considers Dead Space sci-fi, and it is, but it's more horror than it is sci-fi to me, especially with the music."

Burning Skies, on the other hand, is more of a "good old-fashioned adventure score almost that just happens to have aliens in it [laughing]."

And Riepl learned a lot from weaving themes in and out of the Gears soundtrack. "We tried to keep that in mind as we were writing," he said.

One of the most challenging aspects of scoring a game like Resistance: Burning Skies is the need to create music that can be triggered on and off and even altered by players' actions.

"With games you're still writing to support emotion and story and action, but there's a different approach," Riepl told us. "You have to keep in mind when you're writing that this piece can be broken up into sections to be more interactive, or to be triggered at different times."

"We have to make this as interactive as possible, as if the music is contoured to what each individual player is doing," he added.

"With Dead Space…there were four layers of music that they had that were constantly streaming," Graves said, but scoring Burning Skies was more "broad strokes" than specific themes to be trotted out when they were needed.

"You know there was a certain expectation of what you're going to feel emotionally with horror, and the Resistance series never was a horror game, you know? It's more like a fun roller coaster ride," he said.

When I asked Riepl and Graves about their favorite moments from Resistance: Burning Skies' score, each instantly replied that it was the main theme hands down.

"I think they said they needed 90 seconds of music for the main theme, and I gave them three and a half minutes because it was just so much fun working on it," Graves said. "It's very quiet and emotional."

"It kind of hooks you," he added.

Graves came up with the initial four-note melody, and Riepl proceeded to thread those four notes into almost every other piece he wrote.

"I think there's elements of everything throughout the score in it. There's intimacy, there's action, and there's—it pretty much incorporates every feel in the game," Riepl said. "When I write main themes for games that's usually what I strive for."

The two composers didn't collaborate much beyond that snippet of the main theme; in fact, they hadn't even heard one another's music until it was time to record with the orchestra.

"Of course Sony was getting all our pieces so they knew everything jived, but we personally didn't know what each other was writing, and at the recording session it really turned out really well how well they complimented each other," Riepl said. "And it was a lot of fun because half the music I heard that session I'd never heard before."

"We talked a lot about the scores and we would kind of go back and forth," Graves said. "We exchanged initial pieces and kind of both nodded our heads and said 'Yeah, it sounds like these will go together really well.'"

Luckily Riepl and Graves were largely on the same page as far as influences and direction—the traditional orchestration and dynamics in each's version of the main theme sound remarkably similar for having been composed by two different people.

"My influences fall back to you know, like, Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky as far as kind of dramatic timing and things go," Graves told us. "There's a wonderful kind of programatic aspect to those guys' music and that's kind of what I always end up hearing in my head."

Riepl, meanwhile, pulled from big band composers of "dramatic, dynamic scores" from the 40s and 50s, like Max Steiner and Franz Waxman.

"We definitely stemmed it in traditional orchestra," he said. "Growing up and listening to music, and where all our influences come from, there was no game that had these type of scores in it."

Thanks to Jason and Kevin for speaking with us, and don't miss Resistance: Burning Skies when it releases May 29 for PS Vita.