The music of the Assassins Creed franchise has always been at its core. We sat down with the composers of the latest entry Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, The Flight (Joe and Alexis) to discuss how they first got involved with the project. They also covered the differences between Odyssey their previous work on the franchise and how projects like the Horizon franchise feed into their continued evolution as a pair…
Obviously, you’ve worked in the franchise before, but can you talk us through how you got involved with this particular game?
Alexis: So it would have been November 2022 that we were contacted by Jerome Angelot, the music supervisor who we worked with on Shadows. He told us a little bit about the project and said ‘would you be interested in pitching?’ We’re fans of AC anyway, and like everyone’s been talking about, ‘when’s there going to be one in feudal Japan? Feudal Japan is the one we want. They’ve done everything else we want feudal Japan.’ So that was when we heard it was going to be set in Feudal Japan.
Joe: We were like, “yes we want to do it”. But it was quite an involved pitch process, as it kind of always is. They sent us a lot of information and historical information and pictures and inspiring stuff, and we did a couple of pieces of music for them, and also just and kind of told them what our angle on it would be, and they seemed quite keen.
Alexis: They had quite specific things about what they wanted it to be and what they didn’t want. So yeah, as ever with pitching is we do our thing. We do like a mini version of what we think would be a good place to start in the game. Yeah, they loved it. The rest is history.
There have been other games set in Feudal Japan in the past few years like Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of The Ronin. Did that affect your thinking and preparation?
Joe: When we approach any projects, we always try and do our take on on it, and at pitch process, we always kind of sit and go, ‘How would we do this?’ Obviously there have there been lots of films, there’d be lots of things set it set in that era. Rather than trying to do anything like those we just basically do our take.
Alexis: They didn’t necessarily want it to sound like a Hollywood score with a few Japanese flutes on top, but that was kind of their simplified message of what they wanted. They wanted Japanese traditional instruments, within that which, I guess you know, which is why we got asked to do it, because we did that quite successfully with the Greek instruments on Odyssey. We played Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of the Ronin didn’t come out until we were well into doing this. We tried not to listen to any other games. When we were doing the pitch, we’d watch films, and we’d listen to some Japanese traditional music.
Joe: And Wu-Tang Clan. That was kind of the thing where we were talking about Wu-Tang Clan, because that was a big thing from when we were growing up with their use of samples and that they always had a kind of Samurai vibe. These influences, they’re always quite subtle, and maybe people won’t spot them, but those are kind of the things that we hook onto. We have a lot of music that we play and listen to together and find little hooks on things where, where we can jump off from.
You’ve mentioned films. Were there any scores that fed into this?
Alexis: We both love Ryuichi Sakamoto, the composer. So we watched some film’s he scored.
Joe: Harakiri was the first thing watched. It’s an extraordinary film.
Alexis: The score to that is amazing, yeah. That is a tragic film, such a heart-rending film. This game has tragedy. It’s got its dark moments which, I guess, is why it’s called Shadows. It’s quite a gloomy story with a lot of pain in it. Harakiri was a good introduction.
Joe: Then we were looking at what modern films were then influenced by Japanese culture. We watched Kill Bill and Seven Samurai, then you go into the Spaghetti Westerns, and kind of coming at it from that angle, and watching films – like we’ve sat and watched Ghost Dog which is one of my favourites. So it was quite broad but I think looking at how modern music has been influenced by Japanese culture.
Alexis: It’s not necessarily specific sounds or but it’s about how you can meet that with modernity basically. We wanted it to be a modern sounding score. This is The Flight with the with the influence of the Japanese traditional instruments.
Joe: Keeping them at the core of it all.
What was your starting point with the score?
Joe: The first thing we do is we look doing theme suite of the for the protagonists. So we sit down and we write a piece of music quite loosely based on a story arc, which we imagine in our heads the kind of music that they would need in the game. The starting point of one of the characters with them growing into the character that they become, and then some kind of bit of fight music and a bit of stuff.
Alexis: This is one of the things about Shadows is that you’ve got these two playable characters that you can swap in and out of the whole time. They’re just as important as each other. It’s not like with Odyssey, where you just pick Cassandra or Alexios at the beginning and then play with them all the way through. So our first task, and one that took us quite a long time on just these, we call them kind of story suites for Naoe and Yasuke. It was both a kind of a good kicking off point for finding the sound of Shadows, with Ubisoft and with Jerome, but also for us making sure we had enough, we use this word ammunition, for a long score.
So making sure that we have a theme that we can use that works within a few different contexts for each character, maybe actually a couple of themes for each of them. Their main theme, and perhaps a more tragic theme or origin theme. It’s just so we’ve got, like Joe was saying, a sense of their story arc, so that when we’re doing cinematic sections of the game, we can refer back to these story pieces and try stuff out and see what works before fully going down a path.
Did you find the amount of music was different to this than Odyssey, with the size of the games?
Joe: It was still a lot of music.
Alexis: I think we did four hours for Odyssey and I think we did about three and a half hours for this. So they were similar amounts. The music system is quite different. In Shadows, it’s, it’s the interactivity is actually on a much greater level than in Odyssey. We actually wrote a lot of pieces to help the music system be much more fluid and much more interactive so that you’re not swapping between pieces when you’re going around in the open world. A piece can kind of develop on top of itself, which gives it much more. It should be more immersive. You don’t have to stop one piece and go into another, and you don’t get tempo clashes or key clashes. So it was more complicated music to write on most of it. It was a similar, amount. We had a similar amount of time to do it.
Joe : The main difference with Odyssey was how is the style of music and how we played it. And it was a lot of a lot of it was, was us jamming and playing live, and so that it was in Odyssey. In Odyssey a lot of the time was spent kind of wrangling, just us throwing things at the computer and getting it all together. It was all very live. This was not more synthetic, but it was, it was a different process that we went through.
There are some Japanese rock/pop artists involved, can you talk us through that?
Alexis: That wasn’t up to us. Jerome, the music supervisor, always wanted some songs to use as kind of set pieces in this game. He found TEKE:: TEKE who do Naoe’s story related moments.
He had this vision about having songs in there to make it feel, and make the experience feel more cinematic. Yeah, you know, when you get a licensed song, needle drop or something like that in a film, he wanted to get that kind of feeling into this game, which has quite a lot of kind of stylised moments. We’ve seen a couple of them, but we’re looking forward to actually playing it and seeing how these things drop. Quite often we would be doing a bit and he would say, oh, you’ve just come out of this song, you know. So, we would listen to that and see how we can come out of it smoothly. So it’s all kind of tight.
Joe: So we found a Koto player, shamisen player and a singer, and they were obviously brilliant players and fantastic to work with, but also really inspiring to get to see, see what can be done with the instruments and the feedback from them.
Alexis: Yeah, because these, these aren’t instruments that you can just buy, pick up and play yourself. They take years of training.
Joe: We did find some masters, and it was, it was brilliant to work with them.
Alexis: It’s always really good when you’re doing a score, we’ve done quite a few game scores now and to have things that are individual to that score just instantly gives you something new to think about. Each score should have something that only that score has in it, and that way you can still make sure it’s fresh.
Do you feel your style has shifted from when you worked on Odyssey?
Joe: Our style evolves all the time. We’re in Canada at the moment thinking oh, this was where we were when we went for the first meeting with Odyssey and to be honest, I felt like, I think it seems like a different person then because the projects are quite long. Yes at my old age, I still seem to be learning a lot as we go along and you look back, and we’re incredibly proud of Odyssey, but we have always been learning and evolving.
Alexis: We are definitely on, on a path. We both started from the pop music industry, rather than from film school or anything like that. So, we actually got in via that. And we’ve kind of been, it’s kind of the, I guess the things that more traditional composers would say was their bedrock, is the stuff that we’ve kind of been learning more, more how to, you know, and more how that clues in with our bedrock, which is our bedrocks more modern production, and sitting down with bass guitars, yeah, but, but with, with dance music, and with, you know, hip hop and things like that. So gradually our story is them fusing.
We’re a lot more confident with the big orchestral stuff now than we were on Odyssey. That was great on this because from day one, they said, you know, when we’ve got those moments, we’ll record them properly. We’ll do sessions in London with a string orchestra.
Joe: It makes a lot of difference. You really hear it.
What are your first memories of the franchise?
Joe: I remember seeing the trailer for the first game on TV and ringing up my brother, my little brother, and saying, Have you seen this game? It looks incredible. That was, that was my first like, wow, this. It was so different. And then, and then, when we were first engaged in it is actually realised how important the music is, and how much I love the music of the franchise Ubisoft in general, always has a high standard of composers, and the music is always really cool.
Alexis: I remember the cinema advert. We actually did a very small part on Black Flag on AC: Black Flag, when we actually composed some pieces for the multiplayer section of that. I think that was the last AC with a multiplayer and separate multiplayer disc. We wrote a few pieces for that, which actually helped us get the Odyssey gig. The creative director had heard those and liked them.
When that came along, I watched an entire playthrough of AC III online with no commentary. I couldn’t believe it. It blew me away because I guess I hadn’t played a game like that since, I was a teenager and playing games, but they weren’t anything like that the time difference between those things. So I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, wow, this is, this is amazing. The detail they put into the locations and the historical work they do, it’s mind-blowing. Now we’re part of it. We get invited to these concerts where they put on shows where they do, bits of music from every AC, all in timeline order. It’s amazing.
How do you find something like Horizon, which is very much focused on Aloy vs the multiple protagonists here?
Joe: Both Horizon’s were quite different with how we approached the music. The first one was about the environment. So it was about the incredible landscape and the world you were in.
Alexis: We didn’t really concentrate on Aloy on the first one. It’s very much kind of her journey was, Joris who wrote the main theme. On the first one we were more focused on the machines, and the sort of more synthetic, man-made aspect of that world. We didn’t really concentrate on Aloy in the first one.
Joe: The difference between Odyssey and this. With Odyssey there was a lot of music based on the location and the map and the biomes where we were, and then it was still, it was still at the core it was an odyssey, but it’s a personal story. So, we’re writing about their people. They’re all different. In all games we get briefed differently, and we always try and find a different angle.
Alexis: So we definitely learned from what I was saying about earlier, what the thing we call ammunition, which is Games is a long it’s a long amount. It’s a big amount of music. You have to do a main theme for the main character. Then a couple of other things. We find that while we’re in the kind of beginning stages, it’s good to kind of have as many as many themes as for main things, for important things in the game, as you can you know. So, a theme for the protagonist, a theme for a couple of themes for the main characters. Maybe a theme for the world, because you can’t just spread one theme out over a whole game score. You need more. Being able to have thing’s in our arsenal.
This scene’s got these characters in it. They’ve got their own family. It’s set in this area, which has this sound, you know, it just, it helps you when you’re when you’re writing such a kind of intimidating amount of music.
Were there any particularly unique challenges presented by the score for this game?
Alexis: One in particular, they had this bar of interactivity that they wanted us to reach. We hadn’t tried to get up quite up to that level before. So that was a challenge to begin with. When it works, and you see it in the in game and it works, it’s brilliant, but when you’re writing it can be difficult to to do it that way, and sometimes slightly more restricting than you’re used to as composers, but you’re writing for a game. It’s how the game plays.
Joe: For me when I’m playing games, there’s nothing worse than fight music triggering and ending badly. It’s always really jarring. When you know you start a brawl, and you deal with them quite quickly. The big fight music starts, and then it has to end. That’s what pulls me out of games, and hopefully that will smooth those kinds of transitions out, so it doesn’t go up to something too big. It can be quite subtle shifts in the feel. So hopefully it’ll work.
Alexis: Then the other thing is we have these two characters, their music, has to be as strong as each other, but also has to work, has to work together so that if you are swapping between the characters, it doesn’t suddenly jar from one to the other. While they have a lot of differences in their stories and their backgrounds and the way they play, they are still in the same game, and they have a lot in common as well. So, so that’s got to work, yeah, so hopefully we’ll have met those two challenges.
Are there any areas of the score you especially wanted to cover?
Joe: Naoe’s stealth music is, I think, really cool. It’s written that she is not in trouble when she’s in stealth, this is her thing. This is what she’s good at. So writing stealth music where she feels strong, we worked very closely with the singer who we were working with, and we literally wrote lyrics for words for her to be saying, and sentences for her to be saying, and the inner dialogue of Naoe, while she’s while she’s out hunting. So there are these very subtle whispers and effects that she’s doing. It just makes her feel strong, rather than if you’re in hiding your hunting.
Many thanks to The Flight for taking the time for this interview.
Chris Connor
