Jeff van Dyck sent his first pass of the Shogun: Total War music to Mike Simpson, the creative director at The Creative Assembly. He had planned to blend Japanese music with a contemporary orchestra. Simpson's reply, as van Dyck recalls it, was short: "it sounds too western, make it more authentic!"
Van Dyck had grown up around people who made music for a living. His father, Ralph Dyck, was a composer who also worked in research and development for Roland, and the boy spent his early years watching musicians record onto two-inch analog tape in his father's sessions. He called it "an education through osmosis." When his father moved to the United States, van Dyck, then thirteen, stayed behind and looked after a studio's worth of gear, including an eight-track setup in his bedroom. He played in Vancouver bands as a teenager and toured Canadian hockey arenas with them.
In 1992, at twenty-three, he joined Electronic Arts as an audio lead, composer and sound designer. The job, he said, felt "like I was being paid to do my hobby." He was put on sports and racing games: FIFA, NHL, NBA, Need for Speed. For one of the early FIFA games on the Sega Mega Drive, the producer wanted the sound of a sports broadcast on American television, with guitars and horns. Van Dyck did not like that idea.
He wrote techno instead. His reason was simple: "I always felt it matched as FIFA was more European, and most techno at the time was coming from there." One of the programmers on the team, Brian Plank, told him to do what he thought was right. The producer and the team came around to the result. For years afterward, the sound of the FIFA series was built on that choice.
He stayed about five years. By 1997 he was tired of sports games, and his wife, Angela, an Australian singer who had sung on the first Need for Speed games, was tired of Vancouver rain. "The big move mainly came from marrying my Australian wife Angela," he wrote. They moved to Brisbane, and he began taking contract work from studios around the world. His first jobs there were EA Australia's Rugby and Cricket, both built by The Creative Assembly. "I couldn't seem to get away from sports!" he joked.
Then The Creative Assembly began Shogun: Total War, a strategy game about feudal Japan, and gave him the music. That is how his first pass ended up in front of Mike Simpson, and how it came back marked too western. This time van Dyck did not argue. He studied Japanese music and its instruments, and rewrote the score with a quieter, more minimal, melancholy approach built on traditional instruments. Taiko drums carried the battles. Van Dyck later noted that taiko had been used in real warfare to signal troop movements.
Shogun: Total War came out in 2000. Its expansion, the Warlord Edition, earned van Dyck a BAFTA in 2001, the first major award of his career. He went on to score Rome: Total War, which was nominated for a BAFTA in 2005, and he became the audio director for the Total War series. Years later he would also lead the audio team on Alien: Isolation. The sources differ on whether that BAFTA was awarded in 2014 or 2015.
So the same man, within a few years, once refused a producer's instruction and once accepted a director's correction. Both times the result was better than the first plan. The FIFA producer asked for a sound van Dyck did not believe in, and the director asked for a sound he had not yet found.
When someone tells you your work is wrong, how do you know whether they are standing in your way, or telling you something true that you could not hear yourself?