Fallout 3 Music Interview

IGN has conjured up their own four-page interview with video game composer Inon Zur about the work he did on Fallout 3.

IGN Music: Since the world of Fallout 3 is sort of this mutated post-apocalyptical, nuclear holocaust scenario, did you at all immerse yourself in any of those old Road Warrior-styled movies from the ’80s, when post-apocalyptical nuclear holocaust scenarios were the hot sub-genre of sci-fi movies?

Inon Zur: It definitely had some impact on the score and believe it or not also some old Vietnam movies and other films where people were not afraid to go bezerk with the score and use some sound effects like Full Metal Jacket and other scores that had a lot of weird effects in the musical score. So I definitely got influenced by that. Anything that could be achieved to give the player this dark, apocalyptic feeling of what’s going on, this almost hopelessness and retro nuclear war kind of thing.

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IGN Music: Without giving away too many of your secrets, there’s this weird ambient texturing floating through “Into The Wasteland” where it almost sounds like somebody breathing heavily or the wind blowing through a bunch of dead grass. How did you concoct that sound?

Inon Zur: Think about it this way: there are tons of sounds around. There are old synths, there are some new samples, and there are some instruments that you can use out of their range so that they sound weird, and then there are the combinations. I mean it is like taking a palate of colors. First you choose your base colors and then you start mixing them around and trying a few things. You need to have in mind in general what you want to hear; what is the effect you want to achieve? Then you start the processing of almost creating a new sound out of existing sounds. This is vaguely the secret [laughs].