Recently, Final Weapon had the chance to interview one half of the duo behind the Assassin’s Creed Shadows soundtrack: The Flight. Alexis Smith spoke about their work on how they got into video game composing, their work on the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the differences in working on big IPs compared to a brand-new series, and his thoughts on the upcoming sequel for their first major entry into the gaming industry: Alien Isolation.
We hope you enjoy this exclusive interview, and we’d like to thank The Flight for making this possible! Enjoy!
It is very nice to meet you! Obviously, I think your biggest work recently was Assassin’s Creed Shadows, but actually,y my first question is about before that: How did you find yourself composing for video games? Was that something you were always drawn to or something you stumbled into?
Alexis Smith: Yeah, it’s kind of a combination of both. Both me and Joe [Henson] started quite a long time ago, when we were quite young. I started when I was 19 and went into the music industry. I started off as an assistant to a record producer…and so I worked for the first ten years in the music industry [in London] doing programming, songwriting, and producing for bands and pop music acts.
Joe started off as a bass player, who played in band. Then, he got into songwriting and creating his own band, then he got into TV composing through his brother, who was a TV composer. We met because I was producing a band that he started, and we didn’t want to work on our own at the time. This is when we thought of The Flight, we wanted to create a partnership to do stuff.
One of the things we were both interested in was games, because we grew up in the 80s and 90s as video games were really flourishing and becoming a normal thing that people had in their home. It was a notoriously difficult industry to get into music-wise, so Joe got a contact, someone who worked at EA. We kept in touch with her until she had a game that she wanted to sound like a “music of the time,” like pop music. So kind of a combination.
I think I know which EA game you’re talking about, but can you tell me, just in case?
Alexis Smith: It’s up there on the wall. (He proceeds to show a picture of Zubo, released for the Nintendo DS in 2008). That was our in! They wanted it to sound like Beastie Boys and stuff like that, and we knew how to make that sort of music. It was brilliant because at the time, obviously, when they started doing it, they wanted it to be a big game. But by the end, it became a DS-only thing.
We were disappointed in it at the time, but in retrospect, it was brilliant because it gave us a taste of big studio development, but without anyone knowing it and pigeon-holing us.
As you said, it helped you transition to big games, which brings us to your most recent project, Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
Alexis Smith: There was quite a long path between those two. Alien Isolation was our first serious game, which again came about because one of the people who worked on Zubo went to join Creative Assembly. We bumped into him at this event in Brighton, and we saw that he had a lanyard around his neck that had an Alien egg on it.
We were massive Alien fans, so we went up to him and asked, “What’s that?” He said “We’re going to be making an Alien game.” “Right, when you do, let us know because we want to pitch for it.” And yeah, we did, and that was the proper kickoff for us.
Which led to Horizon, Gotham Knights, and then Assassin’s Creed. Speaking on Assassin’s Creed, I want to ask: the game features two playable characters. When listening to the soundtrack, I noticed that you combine instruments from the [Feudal Japan] era as well as instruments from the modern era. So what was it like combining those two different identities, both in regards to the two different characters and the two different styles of instruments?
Alexis Smith: So first up, we and Ubisoft always wanted this score to be intrinsically a modern score, but with influence from Japanese traditional instruments. When it comes to full-on Japanese traditional music, there’s diagetic music in the game. If you go into a town, you might see someone playing in the town square. Ubisoft did that and recorded really good traditional Japanese instrument players in Japan or in Canada.
Assassin’s Creed is a science-fiction game. Each title is in a different era of history, but it is all connected by the Animus. We touched on this with [Assassin’s Creed Odyssey], but Odyssey was a much older game, so we made it sound older. With this, we really wanted to do a modern, dark-sounding score but with the influence of these instruments. Once you get past the beginning of the game, the soundtrack becomes more modern in all aspects.
The first thing we did on the game was stamp [Naoe and Yasuke’s] musical identities because they’ve got very different character identities in the way they fight, the way they creep around, the way they interact with the world, and their backgrounds. We wanted each of them to have very different musical themes, sounds, and instruments associated with them.
We did five-minute musical pieces, which we called Story Suites, in which we were finding their individual themes and finding their instruments. Whenever Naoe is in a cutscene, you hear certain instruments, and whenever Yasuke is in a scene, you’d hear certain instruments associated with him. The other thing we did with these pieces was that we took their story throughout the game, from the beginnings, to whatever events shape them, to where they end up, and made the music a microcosm of their story throughout the game.
Again, because it is so important that you can play as two characters and switch between them, we couldn’t have either of those themes be the theme of Shadows. We decided to write a main theme of Shadows that is them, coming together, and being a team. We wanted to make this as modern as we possibly could, but then combine both of their sets of instruments and play them together in a melody.
On the subject of the main theme, I couldn’t help but notice some other Assassin’s Creed motifs in there!
Alexis Smith: It’s not actually [Ezio’s Family]! It’s got an echo of it in there, in the way the melody is structured, but it’s not actually that. In every Assassin’s Creed game, they do a version of Ezio’s theme, and we did that on Odyssey. But in Shadows, they took the band that did some of the songs on the soundtrack, and they actually did the version of Ezio’s theme. It’s on the EP that came out last year.
Were there any other Assassin’s Creed soundtrack hits that you threw in there?
Alexis Smith: Ezio’s theme is always the one that gets echoed throughout the score. There were moments in cutscenes when you’d see the hidden blade for the first time, and we weaved a little bit of that in. It’s subtle, but big fans of the series would spot it.
As you mentioned before, this is not your first foray into the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Before that, you worked on Odyssey and the multiplayer mode for Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. What were some of the differences in the process between those and Shadows?
Alexis Smith: The multiplayer was a very gentle introduction to the world of Assassin’s Creed. It was very useful for us, but not like scoring a whole game. Odyssey is the oldest-set Assassin’s Creed game. We gathered all of the old Greek instruments that we could at the time, and we recorded most of the soundtrack live in this room…which was a very time-consuming process.
That’s not the way we looked at Shadows because Shadows is a completely different-looking game. It’s a much darker, much more tragic story than Odyssey, which has a bit more “fantasy” to it. Everyone knows the Greek myths, and you come across legendary creatures like Medusa and the Minotaurs. Shadows is much more recent in history, and it’s more about human conflict and struggle.
We always knew the soundtrack was gonna have a darker feeling than Odyssey. This was at a time when the pace of technology was accelerating, so it was less us sitting in a room with instruments and going from there, and more about creating these soundscapes and painting this world using all different sounds.
How closely do you guys work with the writing team to figure out the right tone for a specific scene?
Alexis Smith: We’ve been involved with games that aren’t as big as Assassin’s Creed, where we get access to more of the people involved with the game. In a franchise like this, which puts out multiple companies with a really high standard, it’s a big operation with a lot of people. When we get on the project, we meet the narrative director, the audio director, the creative director, and the game director.
We spend hours with them, and we learn how they want the game to be, the story of the game, how the idea of the game came about, and what the important pillars of the game are. Once we’re on, and it’s quite a tight timeline since there’s a lot of music to write and we don’t have much time, we work with the music supervisor.
It’s his job to give us feedback and tell us what’s going on at Ubisoft, and it’s our job to work with him. It’s very difficult when there are multiple people to talk to, so having one person is way better. As things developed and the story changed, he would tell us.
You’ve also worked on really big intellectual properties like Alien and the DC Universe. What are the challenges of working on those compared to Horizon?
Alexis Smith: I would actually compare Assassin’s Creed with those big properties because the difference between them and the first Horizon is that there is a certain benchmark and a lot of body of work, not just with the games, films, and books, but also the scores. There’s still some flexibility, but it has been done, and you can listen to a lot of composers who’ve worked on the franchise.
Even though people might say that they want this [soundtrack] to sound different, there are still pillars of each of those franchises that the music has to fulfill. If you’re asked to work on a Star Wars game, you can’t just make it electric guitar. With Alien, although we pushed away from Jerry Goldsmith [the original composer of Alien], one of the things that makes Alien special is that Jerry Goldsmith sound. There are a lot of sounds he made using the orchestra that were far ahead of their time.
Gotham Knights was a superhero game, and especially with a dark DC superhero, it has a sound to it that has already been set up. We had to find our own path while still linking in with it. The game that was completely unset was the first Horizon, when it was a blank slate and a completely new IP. That was really exciting because it was the first time where there wasn’t anything set, and it was up to us and [Joris de Man]. When it came to the second one, there was expectation there, too, since we were following our own work.
I gotta ask: is there a dream project or franchise that you’d love to work on someday?
Alexis Smith: There is…and we’re currently working on it, and we can’t tell you what it is. But the other thing that we love is doing something completely new. There’s something really nice about starting something new where you can form it yourself.
I have one last question with something you may not be able to answer… Alien Isolation 2?
Alexis Smith: Announced, wasn’t it? We didn’t know about that; we knew that they wanted to finally release the soundtrack on the 10-year anniversary, and we were involved with that. But we didn’t know that they were also gonna announce Alien Isolation 2. The game industry is very, very secretive, and I honestly know nothing about that game, but they are in a very early stage. We’re not currently working on it, we’re working on something else.
If you were approached for it, is that something you’d want to work on?
Alexis Smith: …I can’t really answer that! They did such a great job on the first one, and it was a very cool game.
Will we be seeing you again on the rest of the Shadows DLC?
Alexis Smith: Yeah, possibly! Assume that we are, since we did all the Odyssey DLC. I don’t think I can get into trouble for saying that.
Thank you so much for your time, and it was great talking to you!
Alexis Smith: No problem, you too!
Note: This interview was edited for clarity.
