SWC: How did you get your start in music composing?
MARTY: Well, i started in commercial music in Chicago and did jingles for almost fifteen years. That was early in the 80s.
But I was always a gamer so I was watching how game audio was maturing and progressing, and it got to the point about 1993 when I played the game Myst and I thought, “Oh these guys really get it--they’re doing something very interesting and it doesn’t sound just like a game.”
So I met Robin and Ren Miller, and I worked on Riven which was their sequel, and I met the guys at Bungie and worked on Bungie games and by 2000 I had switched over to nothing but games and got hired at Bungie as the audio director there.
SWC: What do you remember as challenges, your production timelines--what was the work environment like then?
MARTY: In the late 90s there was still memory constraints and voice limits and a lot of that stuff was still in there, so I had to function as good as possible within those constraints.
But it still seemed like lightyears ahead where it might have been in the 80s, so I was pretty happy with that. And since then, in the last ten years, it’s just unbelievable how much more we can do with the technology and I think it’s just going to keep improving.
SWC: What about the attention to sound now, it plays a much bigger role--when are you pulled in during pre-production?
MARTY: There is no such things as an Audio Director in films, and that means you have your editor’s opinion, and the director’s opinion, and you have a composer and a sound design guy, and there’s nobody who’s got a singular audio vision (usually) for film unless it’s a director.
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Thanks for sharing this interview.
Lately I've been listening to his soundtrack for ODST--great ambience for writing.