This holiday season we’ll get the next installment in Master Chief’s ongoing saga, Halo Infinite. The game will launch across two different console generations, and help to kick of Microsoft’s next generation console in the Xbox Series X. We finally got to see some campaign footage last week, but like all major blockbusters, it’s all about the pieces of the puzzle, and one key piece is the music. And today we got a new song as well as an interview with the composer that hopes to burn your heart with nostalgia.
The new track is called Set a Fire in Your Heart, and you can check it out below. The game definitely has a callback feel, and probably feels more like a song from one of the older games than what we’ve heard in quite some time. It’s no coincidence either as one the composers, Gareth Coker of Ori fame, talked in an interview with Halo Waypoint about tapping into the legacy of the series to try and tap into something memorable for players.
“Halo has several musical ‘pillars’ to draw from which I’ve found to be extremely malleable. Working the legacy material into where we’ve taken things with new music has been remarkably fun, particularly when getting to play new themes and legacy themes off against each other within the same track.
There is really no predicting what players will fall in love with; I always try and make a guess before any game comes out but I’m quite often wrong! The truth is, that memorable music in games or in film is almost always memorable because it plays out in a way that is tied closely to what is being seen on the screen. It’s that connection that allows people to associate positive memories to music. I believe our job as composers for games is first and foremost to serve the story and the gameplay, serve what we are writing for rather than write something that only serves itself as a piece of music. When synergy between audio and visuals is achieved, alongside a great story with tight contextualization and pacing, helping to create those moments that we hope people will remember forever are why I love writing music.”
Halo Infinite will release this holiday for Xbox Series X, Xbox One and PC. You can read some details about the game’s multiplayer through here.
