Display MoreYouTube channel Tech Talk with Daniel Albu has conducted a pretty cool (and exhaustive!) interview with original Wing Commander composer George "The Fatman" Sanger! He goes through his entire long and storied career and spends some time talking about how he got the job working on Wing Commander and how he was involved in its innovative interactive music feature. You can find the full video embedded below or accessible directly here; the Wing Commander portion is around the 1h43m mark.
The Fatman: But my assignment for the Tchaikovsky thing for Loom was to make Loom sound good on the MT-32. Which was something that I already had proficiency on, that instrument. You know I kind of knew my way around it from having done karaoke versions of things. So that was kind of how I fell into it. So it was always in my mind it was always meant to be MT-32 and then they were somehow pushing the MT-32 as a sound module. And don't know what their price point ideas were or how they decided that it should go out but this sort of thing really played in my favor because it wasn't long before word got out word got to me that there was a company in town that was doing, in town in Austin of all places, that was doing a game that was \going to use the MT-32. So I don't know if you're ready for this segue but I found out about that and I wrote a letter to Richard Garriot that was something like "I am proficient at MT-32, I am. You need to use me, I am the best." You know it might have had a joke in it or a threat or some other ridiculous thing in it but it was definitely arrogant and confident and desperate. All those things, you know. It was just a bit much because I was very excited about it and not very filtered. And I heard that it made it up onto his dart board but somebody else, and I think it might have been Dr. Cat, another game developer who was a friend of mine from the GDCs, went back around and said "Richard you got to use this guy." And so that was how I was eventually approached to do Wing Commander.
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Interviewer: Now still in 1990 you were credited for the music in Wing Commander. Now, what were the biggest challenges you faced in implementing the dynamic music for the game? And you know when it comes to dynamic music, how did you maintain the thematic consistency in the game?
The Fatman: Well there's a little secret to that. So we got the gig for Wing Commander and I was very busy. We had the creative brief that was that we should do something that's sort of like Star Wars and sort of like Star Trek The Motion Picture. Chris Roberts was a very cinema oriented guy and this was the first time to my knowledge that anybody asked a game audio person to imitate John Williams or to do a movie like soundtrack. Before that nobody kind of bothered with that. It was like video, it's got to sound like a video game or just put music in it. And me being busy I went to Govett who had done some of the other little doodly stuff with me and I said "Well you want to handle this?" He says "Yeah I got something in my head. It's been up there since high school, I'll just put it down."
And so he got out his MT32 and slam bam he did that. He did that intro just about the way you hear it and he did the dogfight music just about the way you hear it. And we turn and it's like that was a jaw-dropper right there because people hadn't heard very much on an MT-32 and now they're hearing cinematic music for a video game. That's crazy! And it was all Govett. It's just like this guy that I picked up from the bus stop. And he's always like that. He's always an incredible person. People always, you know, there's a temptation to underestimate him because he kind of sounds like he's from West Texas. Because he is. But he just became a legend. He was very early, innovating and doing the under the hood work in the early sample libraries and eventually people were having him come over. Like Han Zimmer had him come over to help him out with the sample library And the O Show in Las Vegas, the Cirque du Soleil, had him and and the fourth member of Team Fat, Kevin, come over and help them with their giga samplers. So they were up in the booth during the performances helping them work out their technology. But in the meantime this was the moment at which Dave Govett went from nobody to very much somebody. I mean in the historical sense. In my heart he was always adorable. He was always a great friend. But he was right place, right time, earnest effort again.
And then Chris Roberts hears this thing and he says "Well I've got I've got this idea to do interactive. So can you give me for the dogfight, I'd like a piece of music that could be this long and it should be the missile is chasing you. You are chasing the missile. Your wingman's been hit. You know, dire situations blah blah blah blah blah blah." So we just went back to that original piece and we cut it into sections and we labeled them. We slopped a label on them to match what Chris had asked for. And then there were two other guys, Herman Miller and a cat who became a very good friend of mine and a bandmate later Marc Schaefgen. Great guitar player, real bluesy guy, real gritty fellow. I like him. They created the MIDI you know. They put the MIDI into the program however it needed to be to play the sound cards. They created the interactive engine and then it all got played through John Miles's sound thing. and then there's stories about John Miles too but but what I wanted to get back to was that funny story is this was the second time that I became the hit of the trade show because they took this thing out again to one of the Consumer Electronic Shows or something like that and everybody crowded around the booth to to see and hear this this demo. And the press was nuts about this interactive soundtrack. But it wasn't interactive. What they were playing was just dogfight music as David had written it from beginning to end with a dog fight showing on the screen and the words interactive soundtrack and they were just playing the video over and over again. And boy we became famous for doing this great interactive soundtrack that worked so well and so musically but it wasn't that yet. Eventually it became an interactive soundtrack but again you know it's a nice moment. It's nice to be part of something that is the hot thing for a minute. And I wish everybody had that. I hope everybody gets their equivalent at that. But I had that happen a couple of times. So anyway, that's some Wing Commander right there!
