In 1997, a young composer in Seattle offered to put a year of his own pay behind a single idea. The idea was that a real-time strategy game should be scored by a live orchestra. The game was Total Annihilation, made by Cavedog Entertainment. The composer was Jeremy Soule.
He had arrived in Seattle three years earlier. By the account summarized on Wikipedia, which draws on interviews he gave in 2006 and 2007, Soule had been interested in music and orchestras since he was five. He took private lessons with university teachers near his Iowa home. After high school he spent a year building a portfolio and mailed demo tapes to two companies, LucasArts and Square. LucasArts reportedly did not accept unsolicited packages. Square answered, and he started work at its Seattle office about two weeks after sending the tapes. Square gave him his first assignment, Secret of Evermore, which was finished in 1995.
Then came Cavedog. In his later interviews, Soule describes the genre as he found it: strategy games of the time were scored with techno. He wanted something that would make his game sound unlike any of them. His own equipment could not do it. In a 2007 interview he said his setup could run only two MIDI systems at once, so the score needed real musicians.
Real musicians cost money that the project had not planned to spend. So Soule made an offer. Wikipedia, citing his own interviews, says he wagered a year's pay that the orchestra would help the game. One account adds a detail: if it did not help, he would take a reduced salary for that year. Sources disagree on who was on the other side of the bet. Wikipedia names the designer Chris Taylor as the person he convinced, while a forum post says Ron Gilbert, who had left LucasArts, took it. Neither account is a primary record of the conversation, so the name stays open. The size of the orchestra is also reported differently, as 95 or 96 players.
The game shipped in 1997 and the score won GameSpot's Best Music award for that year. It was Soule's first award. Soule's own account of the naming, in the same 2007 interview, was that he named the game as well. Taylor, he said, had wanted to call it "Partial Annihilation."
The wager changed what came after. In February 2000, Soule and his brother Julian formed Soule Media, later renamed Artistry Entertainment. Their first large project was Icewind Dale, whose music won best of 2000 from both IGN and GameSpot. Then Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, and the Elder Scrolls games: Morrowind in 2002, Oblivion in 2006, Skyrim in 2011. Oblivion's score won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Video Game Score. Skyrim's was nominated for a BAFTA.
The record also has a hard chapter, and a museum that honors the work should not leave it out. In August 2019, the game designer Nathalie Lawhead accused Soule of rape, and the vocalist Aeralie Brighton accused him of sexual harassment. Soule denied the allegations. He has never been charged. Materia Collective ended its work with him, his social media pages were removed, and his music store DirectSong appeared to go offline. A 2022 article in the Journal of Sound and Music in Games observed that little had been heard from him since.
So there are two true things on this shelf. In 1997 a composer risked his own money on the belief that a game's music deserved real instruments, and the audience heard the result for twenty years. And in 2019 a person he worked with said she was harmed, which he denies. A score can outlast the argument about it. When the work asks for more than the budget allows, and someone pays for it, what do we owe the person who paid?