ichael Giacchino was having a busy year in 2004. In addition to scoring for other video games such as Call of Duty, he penned music for the hit TV series Alias and Lost, as well as his first major motion picture, The Incredibles (and the video-game version). So when LucasArts wanted to commission him to do music for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, he was reluctant to accept—until they bribed him with a trip to the Johnson Space Center and a chance to pilot the $300 million space shuttle simulator. That worked.
The music on Mercenaries doesn't feel the least bit rushed, and will surely gain him even more attention. Busy as he is, Giacchino devised the original themes for the game, allowing his longtime assistant, aspiring composer Chris Tilton, to take up the task of writing the rest of the score. The music was performed—with gusto—by the Northwest Sinfonia.
Mercenaries is an excellent example of just how good a contemporary game soundtrack can be. There are full-scale Hollywood films out there with less interesting and nuanced music. LucasArts is justly renowned for its audio production, and Mercenaries ranks right up there with the best of their work.
The game is a third-person shooter set in the near future. The premise details a violent military coup disrupting the reunification of North and South Korea. Players get the choice of being one of three main characters. Because players can explore on their own as well as follow the main action of the game, LucasArts and the game developer, Pandemic, wanted each military faction to have a separate "sound." Giacchino and Tilton have done a superb job of following this mandate with both the main faction motifs and the orchestration. Keep in mind that the music will differ as the characters move around—which makes creating a score for a video game, the plot of which is essentially created by the user on the fly, tougher than for a purely linear movie.
Symphonies worth shooting to
The main theme certainly is appropriately stirring, and recurs in various forms throughout, such as the action cues in "Trains, Planes and HMMWVs." Percussion fans get an added bonus with the disc's liberal use of Taiko drums. These instruments are commonly set up on wooden racks and played with sticks. They are arranged in various sizes from relatively small up to several feet in diameter. They can also be smacked sharply on the side for additional percussive effects. Used in the background on earlier tracks, on "Honor and Strength" they are gloriously to the fore, accompanied by Japanese flutes and voice. It's a standout track, quite different in mood from the earlier ones.
But Giacchino and Tilton's inventiveness doesn't stop there. "Hidden Valley Bunker" uses a choir singing Latin gibberish against swelling string passages. The Taiko march quietly in under pizzicato violins. Then the drums drop out while the strings swell ominously and swirl around like a swarm of bees. Really, this stuff is better than a video game deserves.
"Gas Tank on the Roof," with its syncopated brass-and-percussion "bursts" against the theme, works extremely well, and the similarly orchestrated "Explosion Scherzo" ratchets up the tension to the breaking point. The choir is deployed again in "Thermal Event," this time in an expressive and compelling semi-chant. It's a remarkable performance.
