Composer Wilbert Roget II’s not-so-stealthy mission for Star Wars Outlaws was to create music that felt like it belonged in a Star Wars story, while also sounding like something completely new. A task almost as intimidating as facing a raging rancor, the latest score by the composer — who cut his teeth writing original music for some vintage Star Wars games like Star Wars: The Old Republic — is an undeniable success, landing Roget a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media.
Recently, Roget spoke with StarWars.com about his journey as a composer for video games, and how Outlaws was a chance for him to return to the Star Wars galaxy.
An early love of music and video games led Roget to a career creating video game soundtracks. “I grew up as a classical pianist. That was my first musical love, ever since I was maybe four years old,” Roget tells StarWars.com. “And then later on, in middle school and high school, was when I started playing video games. The game Final Fantasy VII was the first time that I really noticed the music in games and was encouraged to write music for games as a result.” After majoring in music at Yale, Roget landed a job at LucasArts working as a music editor and assistant. “And eventually from there, I started writing original music for some of our LucasArts games, like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Star Wars: First Assault.”
After a stint as a freelance composer, Roget returned to the Star Wars galaxy with ILM Immersive’s Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series. Roget describes a successful soundtrack as one, “where it sounds as though the music is simply emanating from the world. It's just the logical conclusion of everything that you're seeing in the art, in the pacing of the gameplay, and the animation, everything just comes together in a certain way, and the music just makes perfect sense in that world.” For Vader Immortal, Roget felt like he was missing something until coming to a realization that the plot was, at its heart, a love story. “I wrote the Corvaxian theme, which you most prominently hear on a skiff ride as you're coming down to the ruins. It has this tragic love story feel to it and that's what I needed to make that realization. And then that melody, which came out of that realization, found its way into a bunch of other pieces that I eventually wrote for the score.”
For Star Wars Outlaws, Roget started with the heart of the game and music — Kay Vess’s theme. From the beginning, Ubisoft's development studio Massive Entertainment and Roget wanted this project to bring new sounds to the Star Wars mix, including establishing new audio to bring the underworld to life. “That's why you're hearing these synthesized basses and musical sound design world instruments. There's some Spanish-influenced guitar in there, and, of course, the electric violin. And this is all because I wanted to establish we are going somewhere different,” he says. “Eventually you get the orchestra, the John Williams-inspired harmonies that establish that this is going to be an adventure.”
While Roget worked to create a new feel for Outlaws, he also looked to past Star Wars soundtracks from Williams for inspiration. The soundtrack from Star Wars: A New Hope was his biggest influence for the project. The final score for Outlaws — which included about four hours of music — took two and a half years to complete, including additional music from co-composers Jon Everist and Kazuma Jinnouchi as well as the cantina music and underworld songs by Cody Matthew Johnson, and featuring over 150 musicians in two orchestras — the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Nashville Scoring Orchestra. Roget delivered music in stems — audio files that break down complete tracks into individual mixes — so strings, brass, and world instruments would be recorded separately and separated out so the Ubisoft teams could take the music and re-edit it, as needed.
Before he started writing, Roget played early versions of the game at Massive Entertainment in Malmö, Sweden, and received fly-throughs of some locations where the levels weren’t completely finished. By taking the camera through these locations, “You get a sense of how it generally feels. It's almost like we're collaborators in describing the scenes that we're scoring to,” he says.
Tatooine stood out to Roget as a favorite location in the game, despite having written music for the beloved desert planet in several previous games. “It was a difficult balance of figuring out how we can get something that makes people who really love and know Star Wars to see that they're being taken care of, but also that entices people who just want something brand new,” Roget notes. “For Mos Eisley, for instance, I put a lot of my own personality into that piece. I played the electric bass, but I actually play it with a double bass bow, on the lowest string, so you can kind of play it as if it's a double bass. So it's a very unique and very grimy and disgusting sound. We wanted all of Mos Eisley to branch off of that. The vibe is here's a very diverse kind of alien area that's way too busy and way too crowded, and there's all kinds of shenanigans going on.”
For the open world Tatooine sections of the game, Roget wanted the music to have a more expansive sound that had a level of intimidation that carried through the music. ”I used the harmony and the orchestration and this very desolate double bass solo played by my friend Sam Bobinsky to sort of convey that level of space in Tatooine.”
Another part of creating the soundtrack for Outlaws was writing music for different aspects of gameplay, including active combat and stealth. “Essentially, what I did was I looked at a piece of stealth music in the Star Wars galaxy, and I thought, well, what are the components of this?” says Roget. “How can I kind of deconstruct that for [different] intensity levels? For instance, at the lowest intensity level of the combat ready state. It's a piece of stealth music. It's a very quiet orchestral. Maybe there's some low, sustaining, brooding strings, and maybe some woodwinds and brass elements can kind of come in and out seamlessly, just hinting at melody, but not really quite getting there. And then we have a separate layer of percussion that comes in when you are very close to certain enemies. So this is triggered by the game itself. And then if you take out an enemy, then a little stinger might happen. Or perhaps, if an enemy sees you, then we have another layer of orchestral sting that's composed of instruments that are not currently playing.”
As this is only the third year the Grammys have awarded composers working in video games, Roget is grateful for both his nomination and the recognition for his peers. “This was not something that happened overnight,” Roget notes. “I know a lot of people in the Recording Academy have worked very hard for a number of years in order to make this possible, and I'm very grateful for their work. I love video game soundtracks, not just ones in the modern era, but in the classic eras as well. And it's like a gift that I couldn't really have asked for, that not only are game scores being recognized, but that our score is being recognized amongst all of these giants.”
