Mark Morgan Interview

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Written by BuckGB on November 24th, 2008

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Let's talk about Fallout. How and when did you get involved in that project?

I had already done a couple of games for Interplay, so when, for some unknown reason the publishers lost their first composer, the lead designer, Tim Cain and sound supervisor Charles Deenan, called to ask me to come onboard.

How did you approach musically the game's dark post-nuclear war atmosphere? How much creative freedom were you given?

I was already experimenting with ambient music and its impact on story-telling. So other than the publisher's desire that the music fit the post-nuclear world of Fallout, I was given wide latitude. The challenge to me was to blend a kind of odd ethnic and industrial sound design into something not only musical, but emotional.

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Planescape: Torment is probably your most famous work and our personal favourite. Tell us a bit about how you first started out writing the score?

Glad you liked it. The developers, anxious to get the game to market, came to me with a truncated time frame to provide a score. Fortunately, they wanted an underlying theme that could be played in many variations to fit numerous characters. Once the basic theme was written, it was a matter of reworking it to fit the game play.

What were you specific goals with the score? How did you deal with the interactive side of the game? How important were themes and theme development as opposed to ambient underscore?

My goal was to create emotional reactions for the player appropriate to the characters and the story onscreen. As far as the interactive aspect of the game, that was not one of my priorities in this particular instance. The score for Planescape: Torment felt like a film to me, in that the themes were primarily character driven.

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