Interview With Inon Zur

At the Bethblog:

Pete: You mentioned Fallout Tactics. I’m wondering if you could talk from your perspective about the difference in approaching those two projects. How are they similar? How are they different in terms of your approach and the music that you composed for each?

Inon: That’s a great question. Fallout Tactics that I did with Interplay was all about being very weird. We tried to find any aspect of music that wasn’t conventional. I had people screaming and shouting in the studio. I had people banging on some chairs, the floor, all kind of really weird things. Basically the outcome was a very interesting score which was not so friendly for listening to it by itself, but it worked pretty well with the game.

What we really tried to do here in the current Fallout is take it a little back to the center, but still maintain very mood driven music, and use some not so conventional aspects of scoring. However, we had battles which we didn’t have in the first Fallout. So when you are engaging into battle, you have battle music that is not like what you would hear in games like GOW but still its more sort of rhythmical energetic music, which is different. We have something which we call musical theme for the game, which we did not have in the previous game. So we have more of a musical signature in this game.[...]

Pete: One other question. How did the experience of writing and creating the music for Fallout 3 change from before you had a chance to see the game and after you had a chance to see the game?

Inon: You know, in fact I had lots of reservations and actually I visited Bethesda and it was very close to what I thought. The document that I got was very well written by Todd and Mark Lampert and Gavin. They did a great job of tapping me into the realm of Fallout and what they were doing. Fallout, yes it’s a lot about the visuals, but the story itself is so powerful. So just basically getting inspired by the actual story created a lot of emotional triggers that helped me to compose the music, rather that actually seeing the game and playing the game. The actual story of this twisted reality, there is like a [whole other] reality that happened and it’s really, really powerful. It helped me a lot.