One morning in the mid-1990s, Frank Klepacki woke up wanting to write a heavy song to the sound of marching boots. He took marching sounds from a sound-library CD and set them to a marching tempo. He began with the drums, then picked up a guitar. By his own account, the first riff he played was exactly the riff that is on the record. "The song was written in one day," he said in a 2023 interview.
He had been behind a drum kit for most of his life. He received his first drum set at age eight and, according to his own site, was a professional drummer by eleven. By seventeen he had recorded a demo tape of his own material.
His way into games was not the one a composer would plan. In his own telling, he began at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas as a tester while still in high school. He was often distracted, but he got curious about how games were made and kept asking the audio director questions. The audio director gave him a trial period. He "passed with flying colors, and that's how I got the job." His first work was on the NES port of DragonStrike and on Eye of the Beholder II. In 1992 came Dune II, a score for which he pushed the sequencing software on his Amiga to its limit.
In 1994 he sat down with the Westwood developers who were starting a new strategy game, Command & Conquer. For its sound, he listened to Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. The result, released in 1995, was industrial and loud: guitar and electronic beats under a war that you ran with a mouse. Some early tracks used voice samples, but those clashed with the game's spoken lines and were replaced.
The marching song came while he was working on Covert Operations, the expansion for that first game. He did not know what it was for. "I thought it was going to be more of a Nod theme," he said, meaning the game's villain faction. He played it for Westwood's president. According to Klepacki, the president said: "This is an awesome song. This should be the main theme for our game." The next game turned out to be Command & Conquer: Red Alert, released in 1996. The song, now called "Hell March," is the first track on its soundtrack album.
PC Gamer and Gameslice magazines voted the Red Alert score the best video game soundtrack of 1996, ahead of Trent Reznor's music for Quake. Years later, Klepacki said of the awards: "I was floored that the soundtrack was held in equally high regard to the point of winning awards. It blew my mind."
Electronic Arts acquired Westwood in 1998, and the studio was wound down afterward (sources differ on the exact date). Its last music from him was Earth & Beyond, four albums' worth. In 2004 he became audio director at Petroglyph Games, founded by former Westwood staff, and scored its first game, Star Wars: Empire at War. The song kept going without the studio. "Hell March 2" became the main theme of Red Alert 2 in 2001, and in 2008 he wrote "Hell March 3" for Red Alert 3.
He wrote it before he knew what it was for, and someone else heard it and gave it the front of a game. What are you making today, with no name on it yet, that someone else may one day call the opening?