You scored the music for the Wolfenstein games. How did you develop the music throughout the series, and what were the most difficult challenges you came across when scoring the games?
Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a really great project to work on for a lot of reasons.. The score looped throughout the entire game – it was budgeted for about 30 minutes of score total including the intro and in-game cinematics. For anyone who played it, they would remember the intro cinematic really set the tone for the game, and it gave me an opportunity to write a suite of themes that I would use in the remaining score. It was a blast finding unusual musical sounds to match the tone of the game.. for one of the levels we recorded and sampled these huge spring drums to create ghostly metallic rhythms with. I really don’t remember anything challenging on those projects, just lots and lots of fun.
When I had the opportunity to score the sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein in 2008, we had more than twice the minutes available to record and even bigger levels and thematic opportunities. (as a side note: It was actually that score that was temped into Captain America: Super Soldier that helped bring me onboard that project a few years later).
Did you develop themes from earlier Wolfenstein games, or start from scratch each time and create new ones?
For the intro cinematic to Wolfenstein (2008), we actually used the same themes I composed for the intro cinematic for the original game, but with a larger orchestral pallette which was fun. Wolfenstein had so much new territory (ha.. no pun intended*), we ended up with a lot of new material, but some nods to the original game for sure. My concept for it was always that the score would feel larger, using a bigger orchestra – everything taken to the next level like the game had done, inspired by Return to Castle Wolfenstein of course! *One of the original mission packs I scored was called Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.
https://evenant.com/interview-bill-brown-composer/