MAY 2025
From classical concert halls to the dynamic world of video game scores, John Robert’s musical journey is as inspiring as it is diverse. With roots in orchestral performance and a passion ignited by the golden era of PC gaming, John has carved out a unique path as a composer, earning accolades for his evocative scores on celebrated indie titles like ‘Tchia’, ‘Gunpoint’, and ‘Fossil Echo’.
In this interview, he shares pivotal moments from his career, insights into his creative process, and advice for aspiring composers - offering a glimpse into the artistry and dedication behind some of today’s most memorable game music…
MASA: We’d love to hear about your journey from classical training to successful video game composer! Can you walk us through the pivotal moments or influences that sparked your passion for game music and share some key milestones that shaped your career path to where you are today?
JOHN ROBERT: This is a deep question, but I’ll do my best to stick to the highlights. I grew up with a background as a classical tenor and orchestral trumpet player - my mom sang semi-professionally and my dad played trumpet, guitar and a whole host of other instruments. While I was in school, I was fortunate enough to have a few opportunities to write arrangements and compositions and have them read (and performed) by my school ensembles. I was never allowed a console system growing up, but at some point in grade school, I got a PC that was powerful enough to begin to run games that were, conservatively, 5 years out of date and I fell deep into what many would consider ‘the classics’ of PC gaming. Lucasarts adventures, TIE Fighter and X-Wing, Doom, stacks of shareware games, flight sims and tank sims, Command and Conquer: Red Alert II, Mechwarrior II, all of these, and more, planted seeds in me. One game though, Outcast, released in 1999 with a score written by Lennie Moore and recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Chorus - it blew my mind and fundamentally changed what I understood video game music could be.
By the time I got to college, my younger sister had begun to make short films, ultimately attending film school and I got drafted to compose music for many of them. That led to a few lucky breaks scoring other shorts and finally a shot at a feature film - one I didn’t get. But all that sparked something in me and by the time I graduated college I had several pieces of concert music that had been performed by various ensembles and the composing bug had well and truly taken hold.
My first big break in video games came after graduation, with Artemis: The Spaceship Bridge Simulator, a LAN-based multiplayer game that recreated the feeling of being on a Star Trek-styled bridge. It was designed to be played on five computers, with each one representing the computer terminal of a specific bridge station - not exactly the flashiest graphics to show off, but very tactile and compelling. The developer, Thom Robertson, knowing that the game showed far better as a social experience than a collection of screenshots, devised a promotion. He released a demo and offered a free full copy of the title to people that made videos of themselves playing it. Well, as these videos started coming out, I realized that this very compelling game didn’t have music in it, and a plan began to form. After verifying that there wasn’t a composer on board, I would download the demo, film me and my cousins playing it and score the resulting film directly. What seemed like an easy task turned into a two-week long process, but when all was said and done, I sent the resulting video over with the tiny asterisk of, “hey, I noticed your game doesn’t have music - if you like what you hear here, I wrote it! Maybe we can talk?”, and, as they say, the rest is history.
From there, my second project came from that most rare of things, an open audition. Tom Francis put out a call for submissions for his neo-noire stealth puzzler, Gunpoint, and I think I dashed out the main theme in around two hours. I would go on to write some additional cues, but ultimately, the only part that got used in the final game was that original main theme. Thankfully, I had the good fortune to befriend my lovely co-composers, Ryan Ike and Francisco Cerda, and from showing the game at PAX and Indiecade, I got my formal introduction to the strange, wonderful world of indie game developers.
A few small projects later, and a few game audio colleagues independently recommended me to Phil Crifo, one of the founders of Awaceb, for their first title, Fossil Echo. I’d met Gordon McGladdery of A Shell in the Pit Audio the PAX previously, and, when it looked like we’d need a proper sound design pass for the game, I reached out and we brought him and Em Halberstadt on to the project. That game went on to win several awards for art and audio and led directly into projects like For The King, Ambition: A Minuet in Power, and Awaceb’s second title, inspired by their founders’ home country of New Caledonia, Tchia.
MASA: What an incredible journey! So interesting to see how those early influences shaped your unique voice in game music. We’d love to hear more about your work on the BAFTA, Game Awards and Game Audio Network Guild award-winning ‘Tchia’. How did you approach creating a score that resonated so strongly with both critics and players?
JOHN ROBERT: I always try to approach every new score with a great degree of consideration and thought, but Tchia required me to go several steps further. Having the game be set in a fantastical version of New Caledonia, celebrating the real life place and culture that Awaceb’s founders grew up immersed in, required me to do a great deal of research. I was fortunate enough to have the time and contacts to double and triple-check and collaborate as closely as possible with the featured New Caledonian musicians to do everything authentically and respectfully. From there, as with every project I’ve worked on, it became a job of taking inspiration from and serving the game, and Tchia was a VERY inspirational game to work on.
MASA: Your dedication to authenticity and collaboration certainly culminated in the delivery of an unforgettable musical experience. How do you tend to adapt your compositional style to different genres? You've worked on a diverse range of games, from stealth puzzlers like ‘Gunpoint’ to CCGs like ‘Mythgard’.
JOHN ROBERT: Honestly, I don’t think of myself as adapting my actual compositional style to different genres that much - I do consciously change and rebuild my palette of sounds and instruments for every distinct setting of every game project, but as far as shifting for different genres, I mostly think about the emotional direction I want the player (or player character) to be experiencing and the pacing of the actual actions the player needs to take to play the game. A turn-based game with no time pressure might tend to be a slower, more contemplative affair, but the music still needs to impress upon the player a sense of peril, of drama and action, providing the directional impetus that the mechanics of the game might lack. A more action-driven game can lean more fully into the energy and excitement, but also might want for more direct interactivity, tying gameplay intensity directly to music intensity. At the end of the day, I suppose I don’t think about it too much - mostly everything is internalized, instinctual, and I really just focus on what I want to make players feel and go from there.
MASA: As a composer who often works on indie games, how do you balance creative freedom with the technical and budgetary constraints of smaller projects?
JOHN ROBERT: I guess I don’t really think about it as a spectrum between ‘creative freedom’ and ‘budget considerations’. While that consideration does exist, (perhaps BECAUSE the budgets I work with tend to be so small) I find myself thinking more about how best to create the sound I want in my studio, playing the instruments I have, coming up with a sound for a project that I can craft whole-cloth myself, and then looking outward if a project requires external guest musicians. Perhaps starting from that method can be a bit limiting, but I find that I’ve gotten good enough with my recording and mockups to make things sound quite plausible with no extra recording budget. On the other hand, it is sometimes important to realize where the project requires something additional that I can’t provide myself. Ambition: A Minuet in Power, for example, demanded a period score, fully embracing the sound and style of the Classical era of the late 18th century, which necessitated me to assemble various ensembles, baroque and classical-era orchestras, soloists, string quartet, etc. in order to do the intricate, chamber-style writing of the era justice in a way that samples could simply not begin to handle.
Ultimately, it’s a balancing act. If I start from ‘things I can do myself’ and then evaluate what things are absolutely essential (live strings and woodwinds for Ambition, authentic Kanak vocals for Tchia, etc.) and pitch the budget accordingly, things seem to work out and we get a fair amount of bang for our proverbial buck.
MASA: Can you share an instance where you had to significantly revise or rethink a composition based on gameplay changes or developer feedback?
JOHN ROBERT: I’m sure all of us have had to accommodate changes to gameplay or level structure or design, but one that leaps to mind foremost was a moderately late-game stage change in how Ambition: A Minuet in Power handled its parties and party conversation system. Originally, on entering a party, you’d have a choice of groups to join and mingle with, then go into a timed action-oriented puzzle game sequence. The music for each party was originally structured with a downtempo ‘map’ theme, then multiple faster, more intense pieces (with on-demand success/failure endings) written to feel like faster movements of the same piece, which we’d switch to when we entered an action-puzzle conversation minigame. Over the course of development, we ended up deleting the conversational minigame mechanic entirely and replacing it with branching narrative conversations, which meant the pivot from downtempo to action gameplay, and back again, was no longer necessary, so I reworked all the music to be presented as a diegetic ‘party suite’, with more appropriate tempos, retaining the on-demand interactive endings to be triggered when the player would move from party business to a plot specific cue.
MASA: What advice would you give to aspiring video game composers looking to break into the industry?
JOHN ROBERT: Every single person finds their own unique path into the industry - some are lucky breaks that work out amazingly well, some involve a great deal of struggle and hard work. My hot take is that whenever you hear someone tell the story of how they ‘made it’, to always realize that whatever path they took, it only worked for them - yours will have to be different, unique to you. With that in mind, here are some thoughts that I think can be applied no matter what your circumstance.
1) Work on your craft.
It doesn’t have to be perfect - we’re all always improving and growing, but listen to the works of the composers you respect, and do your best to reach their levels of writing, production quality, etc. You’ll never know everything, and there’s always room to learn, but getting to a good place with your own production abilities and then expanding to encompass interactive scoring, middleware, etc. will make you much more well-rounded and primed to go when the starting gun goes off.
2) Build a network of friends.
Going to events like GDC or GameSoundCon is wonderful and you can meet a lot of folks there, but game audio Slacks and Discord and Bluesky, and so on, can be just as useful to meet people, follow their work, discuss audio and composition, etc. Find a few other musicians in your friend group and form a club of beta listeners - share your works in progress (full FrieNDA mode applies - don’t breach contracts!) and get, and give, unvarnished, supportive feedback to your colleagues. Ask advice about areas and styles of writing you’re not familiar with. Get to know each other. Improve each other. I can’t stress the importance strongly enough of a support structure of colleague-friends. Bonus: we all specialize - I’ve happily recommended them for jobs that I knew I wasn’t a good fit for and they’ve done the same for me. I’ve probably gotten more work from fellow audio people than any other means.
Make friends.
3) Be visible.
Make sure people can find you and your portfolio on the internet. Make sure they can email you, reach out to you, without jumping through a lot of hoops. Be sure to keep things updated on your latest and greatest projects - seeing that you’re working on stuff tends to beget more work, so, even if it’s fun projects for yourself, share and post away.
4) Be prepared.
Answer emails and messages quickly, be ready to go when the bell rings. At the risk of causing an eternal state of low-grade anxiety, you never know when the opportunity for something cool will pop up and being able to act quickly and pounce on it could be the difference between getting a job and not. (And if it doesn’t happen, don’t sweat it, not every composer is suited for every project, and that’s okay!)
MASA: Such generous and practical advice, thank you. Another question… How do you see the field of video game music evolving in the coming years and how are you preparing for these changes?
JOHN ROBERT: Optimistically, I think we’re going to see the flexibility of interactive/reactive music continue to get better and better. There was a point in the early 90’s where audio solutions like Lucasarts’ iMuse allowed for incredibly flexible interactive music, but only MIDI playback, then when digital (and ultimately live recorded) audio became the standard, we lost that granular interactivity. With the advancement of middleware like FMod and Wwise (and various other solutions) we can begin to tackle that high end musical interactivity with live instrumentation and I find that very exciting. We’re rapidly approaching the point where the degree of interactivity is really only limited by the imagination and creativity of the composer and music implementers and that’s rad.
MASA: And lastly, what we ask all our jurors, what will you be looking for when judging? What makes a piece of work worthy of a Music+Sound Award?
JOHN ROBERT: An award-winning score has to be excellent in every aspect, so I’ll be looking for interesting textures and timbres, creative orchestration, and, because I’m a sucker for it, really memorable, emotionally-effective thematic writing.
MASA: We really appreciate you taking the time to share your insights here - it’s been so inspiring to learn more about your work. We can’t wait to hear what’s next for you. Thank you, too, for being on this year’s Music+Sound Awards jury; your knowledge and experience are invaluable to the competition!
Visit John Robert’s site HERE
