Richard Jacques says he had to pinch himself when he got the call to score Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy game. Not least because way back in 2005, at a video game concert in Los Angeles, Jacques ended up meeting the man responsible for creating the characters and stories that have made such a lasting impression on him: Stan Lee. And in typical superhero style, it was there that Jacques made a wish that would become reality 12 years later.
“I was introduced through a mutual friend and only had a brief chat with him, but [Lee] was explaining how music is a really important part of his stories,” Jacques tells WIRED with a massive smile on his face from his studio in the UK. Marvel encyclopedias, comics, and figurines make up just as much of the furniture here as the massive mixing desk, old-school synths, and score sheets from previous projects.
“I jokingly said to him, ‘One day, I’m going to do a Marvel soundtrack!’ So when I got the call back in 2017 and signed the NDA, as soon as I found out what the project was I was just blown away. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of, but straight away I knew I’d be the right fit for the project.”
The BAFTA-nominated video game composer lives and breathes comic books. If he ever found himself onboard Star-Lord’s ship, he’d be able to take the wheel and navigate the multiverse with his eyes closed. When it came to the pitching process for scoring Guardians, the game’s senior audio director, Steve Szczepkowski, says he didn’t need to any help seeing Jacques’ merits.
“Just his presentation alone was enough,” Szczepkowski laughs over a video call. “[Richard] came in with this Guardians cassette side A and side B folder, so even though I hadn’t listened to anything yet, I’m already thinking this guy knows his stuff. These things don’t get unnoticed, and I couldn’t be happier with the result.”
Jacques felt right at home with the rest of the team working on Guardians. The passion for the Marvel universe from the creative team shines through the game, but it’s the careful attention to detail that die-hard Marvel fans will appreciate most. The game is littered with Easter eggs, from the Dazzler poster in Star-Lord’s bedroom to Lady Hellbender’s treasured Ghilaron skull and the various rarities in the Collector’s emporium (poor Throg!). Szcepkowski wanted to ensure this same level of care and attention to detail was reflected in the game’s music.
He also wanted to break away from the conventions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which the Guardians films are set. In the films, Quill’s mom gives him the nickname Star-Lord in homage to his dad, a celestial—but what if Quill took his name from a fictitious metal band instead? And what if, instead of Star-Lord blasting out some of the biggest tunes from the ’70s on his treasured Sony Walkman, his epic mixtape was crammed full of ’80s bangers?
“We all knew we wanted to carve our own identity, and it was one of the things that Marvel encouraged—[they] were always saying to us ‘We want you to make this your own,’” Szczepkowski tells WIRED. “That became very exciting, and it opened up a whole new sandbox that wasn’t in the movies, which was great.”
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We see and hear this in the game’s opening moments, as the camera slowly zooms in on the Quill farmhouse with an idyllic sunset painting the field and farm machinery around it in shades of orange and gold. It’s a stark contrast to the scene that follows, as raucous metal music rains out of the chaotically messy bedroom of a young Peter Quill.
With your head nodding along to the sound of harmonized guitar riffs and heavy drum beats, you’d be forgiven for thinking the music you’re listening to is one of the 31 licensed tracks that appear in the game. A lesser-known track from the KISS back catalog, perhaps? But no. What you’re hearing is “Zero to Hero” by Star-Lord (the band) performed and recorded by Szczepkowski and his long-time collaborator Yohann Boudreault. When Montreal’s senior creative director, Jean-François Dugas, pitched the idea of Quill adopting the Star-Lord name from his favorite band, Szczepkowski relished the opportunity to deliver the riffs and live out a childhood dream.
“Having played in the clubs since I was 16, it’s nice to have that opportunity just kinda fall into my lap,” Szczepkowski tells us. He ended up writing an entire metal album with Boudreault, much to the delight of his boss. “[Dugas] is probably one of the biggest metalheads I know. There was no having to explain the credibility we were going for!”
As if an entire album wasn’t enough, the team went so far as to create the artwork for the band’s CD inlay, which you read in the opening scene, as well as an interview with Rolling Stone.
“I never set out thinking, ‘I’m gonna write a concept album for the game,’” Szczepkowski explains. “But when you listen to it and you know the game, it is a concept album. And if you don’t know the game, it still stands on its own. It’s one of those fluky things that just came out that way.”
A lot of work went into licensing the game’s soundtrack, which spans an eclectic mix of ’80s music covering heavy hitters from KISS and Europe and floor-fillers from Rick Astley and Blondie. Negotiating the licenses for bands of this caliber is just as complicated as you might imagine, especially since the game was still under its codename at the time, but things go smoothly when you’ve got an industry veteran whose credits include Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, and Crazy Taxi handling negotiations.
“We had a pretty ambitious list of bands for the game, but I’d say we hit around 85 percent of that,” music consultant Randy Eckhardt tells WIRED, while explaining that a lot of the bands and artists featured in the game were also open to additional marketing opportunities. Astley Rickrolling Guardians of the Galaxy players might be the most ambitious Marvel crossover yet, and Mötley Crüe lent a track for a launch trailer.
“The game took long enough to develop that we kept coming up with more ideas, and the labels could have charged us more but they never did—which was awesome,” Eckhardt continues. “This was a once-in-a-career opportunity to take music and gaming to the next level.”
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Where, when, and how these licensed tracks appear in the game is just as important as the final lineup of tracks. I won’t give anything away, but the placement of Europe’s “Final Countdown” during the game’s pivotal end-moments is one of the best uses of a licensed track I’ve ever experienced. Similarly, nothing beats cranking up the jukebox and exploring the Milano as the cast rips into each other and dishes banter with playful jibes, or pulling up to a new planet with “Hot Chocolate” playing in the background.
An area where the music really comes into its own is during combat. The game’s Huddle feature is essentially a quick-time event ability you can activate to give all of the Guardians a damage boost. True to its name, this involves the gang huddling up as you raise your Walkman into the air and choose one of two motivational dialogue options in response to what the other Guardians are saying. Get it right and the volume cranks to 11 as you open up a can of intergalactic whup-ass to a track on your Walkman. Get it wrong and it flops. All of the licensed tracks in the game had to have two separate Star-Lord speeches written for them, a winning version and a losing one.
The music in Guardians of the Galaxy is a story in three parts, and the experience wouldn’t be the same if not for the epic orchestral score Jacques composed. The score also marked a return to the prestigious Abbey Road Studios, 20 years after he entered its doors as the first video game composer to record a score there (for 2001’s Headhunter.) The logistics of recording a full orchestra in the middle of a global pandemic haven’t been easy to navigate; smaller and more frequent recording sessions were needed to account for social distancing measures, but the result has been worth it.
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“Steve [Szczepkowski] and I had the same shared vision that we wanted an epic, intergalactic symphony, and that would be one of the big elements of music in the game,” Jacques tells WIRED. “We wanted it recorded live with some of the best musicians on the planet, many of which have performed in the MCU films, in one of the most famous studios in the world.”
Like Szczepkowski, Jacques didn’t want to emulate anything from the movies and instead set out to create something different that would still sound familiar to Guardians fans.
“From a musical point of view, I knew I wasn’t tied to anything specific,” he says, “but I wanted it to feel like Guardians, to have that sense of trepidation and adventure. This bunch of misfits is constantly bickering, and there’s a huge element of fun in it. I wanted to make sure all of these elements were reflected in the score.”
The result is over six hours of original music and a score that, when printed, is thicker than many books. Recording live with such a large orchestra of talented musicians made a massive difference to the way players hear that music within the game, Jacques says.
“It lifts the gaming experience tenfold,” he explains. Working with a large orchestra, you get so much more dynamic range, and that vital human input on the delivery of every note. When we go to the studio and the players look at the music and ask how we want it [played], we can still fine-tune things and make decisions right on the floor on the day. When [the musicians] give feedback about the writing, that’s something I take very seriously because I look up to those players so much.”
As well as creating an original score for the game, Jacques had to navigate the complexities of fitting his work around the mountains of character dialogue in the game while ensuring his pieces didn’t sound out of place alongside any licensed music or Star-Lord tracks. And moving tracks around meant Jacques might have to completely rework whatever he was composing.
“I can give you the perfect example of where that happened and when,” Szczepkowski laughs. One of the Star-Lord tracks, “Space Riders With No Name,” was initially the choice for the game’s opening scene. It’s in the key of E, but after Szczepkowski wrote the final song for the Star-Lord album, “Zero to Hero” took its place.
“For whatever reason, [the song] got everybody’s ear and attention. The creative director was like, ‘I really want it to be ‘Zero to Hero’ that plays in the bedroom. I said, ‘Well, I'm pretty sure that's in drop D so that's not gonna work, but let me ask Rich [Jacques] nicely if he’ll change the key of the opening … ’”
“That’s the fun of making games!” Szczepkowski continues. “As Rich said, and I can’t underline the importance of this enough: Flexibility is key.”
“If I remember rightly, it was pretty late when that change came in too,” Jacques jumps in. “But these little things make such a difference in terms of the flow of the game. All of these little things that take time and effort make a big difference in the way the game is presented and therefore the experience for the player. It was challenging but a fun challenge to have!”
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And of course, as a devout Marvel fan, Jacques has made sure he’s incorporated some Marvel Easter eggs into his music for good measure. The choral sections you can hear in the game’s music (from the Pinewood Singers choir) won’t be recognizable by most players, as they’re sung in an alien language–Kree.
“It’s quite a guttural language with lots of consonants, which is good for this kind of writing,” he explains. “Great lengths were taken to make it very Guardians, very Marvel—it’s not just arbitrary syllables that are sometimes used in this kind of music for choral effect. If fans listen closely, they’ll be able to hear the names of certain characters.”
It’s rare that music becomes a major talking point following a game’s release. These types of conversations are usually reserved for the mammoth soundtracks and scores we see in games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto, and Final Fantasy. But the Guardians’ 31 licensed tracks, six-hour orchestral score, and 10 original hard-rock tracks are a reminder that it’s been a long time since a game has delivered this level of music. And with Star-Lord’s music racking up over 1 million plays and 75,000 listeners on Spotify, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the band on a stage in real life at some point, backed by Jacques’ orchestral music.
“Maybe we could do Star-Lord live with the full Metallica-style orchestration behind it,” Szczepkowski laughs. “We could literally do a Guardians music tour! Where you get one hour or so of just the score and then the band comes out and then it’s a combination band score.”
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