Burke’s life beyond the Enchanted Kingdom
Kameo's musician, working on new future Rare projects
We have just recently known that Kameo’s musical discovery, Steve Burke, will also take part on the BK: Nuts & Bolts soundtrack along with David Clynick, Robin Beanland and Grant Kirkhope. “We have something for all Rare musician fans!,” claimed game director Gregg Mayles when announcing the good news in the recent chat with the Rare fan community. Yeah, that sounds like a nice and tasty mix to me, and not those strange meals with chocolate milk shake and cheeseburgers or -even worse- chorizo with honey! But we all also want some Burke solo stuff too, don’t we?
Well, the musical site Score Notes has just had the chance to interview him, and according to Burke himself, he has “recently been writing music and doing sound design on a number of unannounced games currently in development at Rare.” Most probably two of those titles are Banjo and the new Piñata Trouble in Paradise. But, when asked about new soundtrack releases from him in the near future, he vaguely answered with a “maybe, not sure when, though.”
In the meantime, the company is not forgetting his ‘new’ star (technically he entered Rare in 2001, but jumped to stardom with Kameo): only some weeks ago they offered more than a whole hour of ‘new’ Elements of Power medleys in their official site. “Rare have been really great and allowed me to give away 1hr 40mins of music that didn’t go on the official soundtrack CD, as MP3 downloads, there’s not many companies that would allow you to do that,” he said.
In fact, he has had quite a lof of work in the recent months. As he summarizes, after releasing Kameo he “scored the music to Jetpac Refuelled and wrote additional music to Viva Piñata“ (21 of the Romance Dances were composed by him). “There’s a bit of work I did on some Microsoft XNA projects, and I’ve been on the judging panels for the XNA game competitions in London and Ireland. Generally I keep myself busy by working on music, sound effects, field recordings, voice-over directing, and I’ve got my recording studio here at Rare so I’m right next to the development teams.” Yeah, it sounds like busy days.
Moreover, Steve Burke comments that on every new project he likes to get in from the very beginning: “For me this is really important, and as the game develops and comes together, the music and sound design become integral and can even affect game design decisions. Being part of a team also allows a fair amount of trust in what I do, so when it is time to write a new piece of music, the game designer can communicate what he wants in a few words with non-musical terminology, and I know exactly what he is looking for.” Deeper on this topic, he also explains that working on videogames is quite different than doing so for the film industry: “it is often non-linear and can be interactive and branch-off depending on what you do in the game, it also has to be varied so it doesn’t become repetitive. We use software tools to manipulate how the music is triggered, and as we work more and more with these tools and see the possibilities they offers us, it has a knock-on effect on the way the game music is composed.”
And despite he spends a lot of time listening to film soundtracks, and he would “like to write a score for a film some day,” Rare fans can be sure that we’ll enjoy his work on our TVs for the moment: “I’m having a lot of fun in the video games industry at the moment, and hope to keep writing scores for games for some time to come,” he assured.
Somehow related news
- You only play twice ()
- Banjo-Kazooie 3 “won’t be a traditional platformer” ()
- Rare working on two unannounced projects ()
- Nick Burton imagines the future ()
- Players yearn for more Conker and welcome back the Piñatas ()
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