Deus Ex Interview: Composer Alexander Brandon

In the Y2K era, Alexander Brandon was most known for his soundtrack composition work for Epic Games’ Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and Tyrian, as well as Ion Storm’s Deus Ex. In the years since, he has taken roles in voice acting, voice direction, sound design and audio direction, and currently works as audio director for Frost Giant Studios (Stormgate). Alexander has vital experience and expertise in the games industry and has seen a wealth of changes in the gaming audio world over the course of his career. His musical talents cover a wide variety of styles from acoustic to electronic, and he has worked with many studios beyond Epic and Ion Storm such as Obsidian, inXile, Retro Studios, Midway and PopCap Games.

Alexander was kind enough to agree to answer some questions regarding Deus Ex via direct message on twitter.

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Just as with visual aesthetics, it seems one of the main contributors to the charm of the audio aesthetics for this era of games was the low fidelity of what was available and possible at the time compared to today. What were the tools like in the 90’s when working on Unreal Engine games like Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex? 

We’ve come a long way since the 90s but in a way we also haven’t! The first iteration of Unreal had 8 bit sound, but right before ship the ability to play 16 bit 44khz was added. This was massive. Making fades in Sound Forge was difficult in 8 bit because it created static at low volumes. There were algorithms in software made far earlier that didn’t do this, but it was different math. 

Ambient sounds could be placed, the joystick button on the simulation window pushed, and you could hear the sounds right away. I loved that. Insofar as other things went it was mainly property based per object, material assignments on a basic level and good ol’ code hookups. The music capacity was streamed (also called red book but the term was misused quite a bit) or MOD files. No General MIDI. We established that early. 

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For the uninitiated (me), can you give a basic explanation of what MODs are? More specifically, how do they function in relation to your composition process for the Unreal Engine games like Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex?

MOD files are a combination of playback information and samples, in a nutshell. MIDI is also playback information but can be used with whatever source. MODs didn’t use synths at first, it was all samples from the earliest Protracker files. The difference is, you didn’t use notation or piano roll note entry. It was in a vertical scrolling step time “per tick” composition method (and still is!). To traditionally trained composers it looked like programming, which is funny to me because I warmed to it very quickly and greatly enjoyed that method even though I don’t use it much anymore. You load up a MOD program, select your samples, then use arrow keys or a mouse to select the tick you want to place your note in, and the computer keyboard or even a MIDI keyboard (in some cases) to play the note. Rinse, repeat until you have your song. It sounds daunting but one can make electronic jams SUPER fast with it. More acoustic music is a bit tougher.

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Would you say the limitations of these tools helped or hindered your creativity when establishing the aesthetics and atmosphere in the music of these games?

Limitations in MODs absolutely bred creativity. That’s what gave Unreal and Deus Ex their unique character. We had 1mb as a limit in Unreal, 2mb in Unreal Tournament and 1.5mb in Deus Ex as maximum sample limits per song. 

Having said that, refining these tracks was the tough spot. We could create really cool sounds but in a lot of cases, looping hitches and other factors would make the music sound a bit less powerful than a refined studio recorded, edited and mastered track. Having said that, there are millions in the retro community that prefer it that way. For me, I think the original version should be kept as the benchmark, but if I had a choice to redo it, I’d take the kind of music we made in the remix album Conspiravision, include a bit more music interactivity and really make it shiny and more impactful. 

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As one of the composers, what would you identify as the defining characteristics of the music in Deus Ex? Give me your nerdiest music terminology. There seems to be a lot of arpeggiation! 

Deus Ex like Unreal used a lot of repetition, such is the nature of MOD writing. Yes, arpeggiation was common. But the keyword is ECLECTIC! Reviewers would sometimes lazily refer to Unreal and Deus Ex scores as “electronic”. Wrong. We used live instrument samples. We used Korg, Roland, Yamaha, whatever synth patches we could, whether they were generated with waveforms or otherwise. Electronic drums and live samples too. We used anything and everything and we didn’t care about cohesion. That was the biggest aspect of those games. And no one seemed to mind that we spread things out so much!

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It sounds like you had a lot of freedom when creating the music for Deus Ex, and were generally only going off descriptions from level designers when composing music for an area. Without specific direction, what did you look to for inspiration for the sound of these pieces?

For sound inspiration for Deus Ex it was definitely the feel of the levels, unfortunately more than the story. That’s another thing I wished I was more communicative with [Deus Ex writer] Sheldon Pacotti about. I think the music could’ve been more powerful with more story attention in the music. But it was like a less grandiose Unreal really. It was moody, futuristic but not on the level of the concept art I saw in Shadowrun or Cyberpunk. What I like is that we more or less established one of the things that people think of when they think of that genre musically. It’s very gratifying. 

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How did you determine whether an exploration piece would be more ambient or more rhythmic? The Synapse (Hong Kong Streets) vs Desolation (Hong Kong Canals) comes to mind.

In some cases I just chose to go full ambient and moody like the Hong Kong Canals. [Deus Ex designer] Steve Powers loved that I did that. And a lot of the team honestly had come from Thief so they were leaning more ambient anyway. In Invisible War [project director] Harvey [Smith] steered me in that direction. I chafed a bit, perhaps I wanted to peacock more with my own melodic and harmonic visions but truly most of the atmosphere really should be gritty and not “in your face”. Liberty Island is another example, and I didn’t get any direction at all on that (that I remember). 

Hong Kong Streets being more vibrant and active naturally forgave a more “song” structure style and I admit it is one of the more memorable themes I’ve written. Then there’s the collaborations with Michiel [van den Bos] which I really enjoyed. We complement each other well.

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Despite the freedom and flexibility you were afforded with Deus Ex’s music, the music feels consistent in terms of style, timbre and overall atmosphere from piece to piece. How did you collaborate with Michiel van den Bos to maintain this consistency? Did you ever find yourselves pulling the overall sound in different directions?

I appreciate your observation with consistency because if there is any it was not written deliberately lol. We seem to really get a notion for an overall aesthetic when it comes to these games and don’t communicate a ton regarding any similarity or shared instrument sets. 

It’s one of the things that, quite honestly has made me wonder why modern games haven’t reached out to ask us to do this again. But I admit I haven’t been asking studios to score games much lately either. Time to knock on a few doors? :)

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I’d like to thank Alexander for taking the time to answer my questions.