Jesper Kyd The Music Man

If You’ve Played an Xbox Game in the Last Decade, You’ll Be Familiar With His Work, and Maybe Not Even Realise It. Oxm Talks to the Composer Responsible for Some of the Best Videogame Soundtracks of All Time.

- Chris Burke

As games become ever more cinematic and immersive, it falls to composers like Jesper Kyd to soundtrack our experiences with suitably dynamic and effective scores. a select discography reveals his hand in the hitman franchise, assassin’s creed’s ezio trilogy, borderlands and State of Decay. We asked Jesper about his latest soundtrack for borderlands 3, reinventing Renaissance music and just how he approaches scoring massive open-world games.

What started you composing, and what interested you in musical scores in particular?

The Commodore 64 was the machine that first allowed me to put my arrangements and musical ideas together. Before the C64 I was mostly fiddling on the piano in our house. My uncles and aunts and grandparents all had pianos, and so when spending time with family I often continued playing on them and exploring ideas. By this time I had spent five years playing classical guitar, singing in a choir and studying note reading. Around the time of the C64 I started studying composition on piano. I took all these classes after school.

What was the first videogame score you did?

The Amiga game USS John Young for Magic Bytes and Interactivision in 1989. This naval simulator only needed one track, though. My first full-length score was for Sub-Terrania on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis.

You were friends with the guys who formed IO, and you ended up scoring Hitman.