The Necrotics are an undead hive mind, so I scored them with dense clusters of voices and strings. The Shin'Hare imagery drew from medieval Japan, so I musically characterized that race with far eastern folk instrumentation. I frequently took my cues (to to speak) from the game's environmental and character design. What did you use as inspiration for this soundtrack? I've never worked on a project where so many fans were emotionally involved ahead of the game's release. (A prime example of the latter is the Shin'Hare race, which is essentially made up of angry samurai bunnies.) I'm particularly won over by the passion of the games' creators and the fervor of the fan base. Lots of things about the game strike a chord with me: the fantasy setting, the extensive mythological backstory, and a gamewide balance between the epic and light-hearted. I was thus brought aboard for a second and more ambitious round of scoring, this time working with Cryptozoic directly. This meant among other happy things that we could significantly expand the amount of music in the game. Fortunately Cryptozoic, the game's creator, had an enormous success raising continuation funds via Kickstarter. After a while there was a publisher shuffle, and GPG was bought by another company. I was brought aboard when the project was being developed by Gas Powered Games, and I was asked to write a relatively modest set of cues. HEX has taken a twisty and sometimes dramatic road towards the public, and to some extent I've traveled along with it. How did you get involved with HEX? Was there something about this project that appealed to you? Today I love doing both film and game music, for both overlapping and complementary reasons. So from that point, the stigma dissolved in my mind and my artistic palette widened. I also came to appreciate the high artistic effort going into both console and PC game scores. As fate would have it, I was offered an in-house composer position at a game studio and was pleasantly surprised to find myself recording the same kind of live orchestral music that I loved doing for film. Game audio was just starting to emerge from the low-tech era, and there was a kind of stigma associated with it, much as there used to be with television music. Michael Gordon Shapiro: When I started my career I was only interested in film music. Mike, can you give us a bit of your background in music? Now that's a lot of capital letters all in a row, so take a deep breath, get over it, and please welcome composer Michael Gordon Shapiro. Massively: On today's column we have the composer of the upcoming TCG MMO, HEX.

Company of heroes soundtrack composer