I was the music composer for the main theme of this FPS based on The Hadron Collider. The game explores what happened when the collider went wrong...

The themes in the game are layered. There's the FPS element which is excitement but also the human element about survival. I wanted a melody that hit both these points so I first pulled out 'The Giant', an epic cinematic piano by Native Instruments. Here’s the piano part I wrote. It’s a large, slightly melancholy, but also tinged with a bit of hope as well.

Because I knew the players would be able to explore the outside world and because at it's heart the game is essentially a struggle, I wanted a human emotional element to my theme. This is where the strings came in. They were epic, but they also balanced out the synthetic elements of the score to reflect the human angle. Had the game been set in a claustrophobic lab inside for example I would almost certainly have made the theme much more synthetic and dark.

Once the main section kicks in, I knew I wanted a hybrid of orchestra and synths going on and the piano would take up far too much space in the mix. So I let the piano go and opted for some other instrumentation to replace the melodic theme the piano was playing. This was mainly made up of synth effects, brass and (very distorted) electronic guitar. here's how that backing sounded on it's own:

To help ensure the tension was at its maximum in my theme and to really seal the action aspect of the game I wanted really great percussion. So I brought out the big guns and  let rip:

So the full track was pretty large - I had around 60 separate tracks in total which were happening at one time or the other. The final piece I'm very pleased with as was the developer.

The game was recently a finalist in Microsoft's 2017 Dream, Build, Play competition: