In 1996, a composer in Los Angeles put a CD into an envelope and mailed it to a game studio. He did it that way because there was no other way. 'There were no MP3s then,' he said years later, 'so I had to send an actual CD.' The disc held an album he had made on his own, an alternate soundtrack for id Software's shooter Quake. Nobody had asked him to write it.
His name was Sascha Dikiciyan. He was born in Stuttgart, Germany, on December 18, 1970, and he worked under the name Sonic Mayhem. In 1993 he moved to Los Angeles. 'I moved there, planning to stay for a year or two,' he recalled. He ended up staying for thirty years.
Video game music was not yet a job that people planned a life around. Dikiciyan has said that when he started, there was not much competition for the work. That is a polite way of saying there was almost no one else trying. He wrote the Quake album anyway, as a way of showing what he could do.
The album was called Methods of Destruction. The original Quake had been scored by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Dikiciyan wrote his own version of that world: industrial, electronic, heavy. Then he mailed it off and waited.
The studio answered. 'Hey, this is id Software,' he remembered them saying, 'we're really interested in you maybe doing Quake II.' Accounts name John Romero as the person who asked him personally to score the sequel; the details of who made the call differ between tellings. Quake II arrived in December 1997 with music by Dikiciyan, composed alongside Bill Brown and Jer Sypult. It was his first game job.
The first job turned into a label. Players called him 'the Quake II guy.' He took it with some humor. 'I guess I'll always be known as that Quake guy,' he said. He kept writing. He scored additional Quake material, then worked on Borderlands, Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, in each case alongside other composers. The credits grew long. The label stayed.
In 2023 he scored Metal Eden, a science-fiction shooter, and described the work in unusually plain terms: 'It was more like making an album with songs than doing a traditional score.' Twenty-seven years after the CD went into the mail, he was doing what he had done to get noticed in the first place. He made an album first, and let the game catch up.
He did not wait to be hired for the thing he wanted to do. He made it, and then he found out where to send it. Is there something you keep waiting for permission to make, when a stamp and an envelope would do?