So I just started talking to the different artists saying, "Look, do you think you could do a contribution to Halo 2 with music in the spirit of Halo?" And every one of them said, "Aw man, listen to this, listen to this!" and different people played all sorts of different things. I was over at John Mayer's house, and he did the whole monk chant, and others did other parts. The one thing that really sorta shocked me, was I was talking to this guy Ben Browning from "Breaking Benjamin", and it struck me just how consumed he was by the game. And even though Ben wasn't a big star, it was his level of dedication that really blew me away. It's funny that he also wrote a song called "Blow Me Away". Then I was hanging out with Incubus, and it was insane, they wrote this big, enormous piece of music.GameSpy: Yeah, I really like the piece that they did that made it into the game.
Nile Rodgers: I think that when the fans actually get the game and see what the deal is, it'll be interesting. There's a lot of weird rumors flying around, and people don't understand the deal with the soundtrack, the record, what the bands did. Halo is orchestral, so it's all music, the only vocals are the monks, and some chants. For the bands involvement in the game, what they wrote were some of the musical tracks, and Marty really used them in a very cool way. So I don't want people to think that when they play Halo, they'll hear, you know, Breaking Benjamin singing "Blow Me Away" while they're running around blasting the s**t out of the Covenant.
GameSpy: Yeah, a lot of people seem to have some questions about that.
Nile Rodgers: People are getting a little wacky, but, you know, that's how people are when you get into chatrooms and places like that and they start speculating. So here's the deal: every composer that contributed to the soundscape of the game did it instrumentally, and then they had to go back and write a rock song as well. So they actually worked their asses off, and that's what people don't understand, the difference between scoring for video games or film.
In a video game, you could have 40 or 45 hours worth of music, and people somehow don't get that when they're playing the game, that there's hours and hours and hours of music. Whereas in film, there's, you know, an hour or 90 minutes of music. Rarely does a film have music from beginning to end. That's what the call cartoon scoring. When I went to music school, I learned about them, and in a cartoon score, the music never stops. When Bugs Bunny walks across the room, each step has it's own note [mimics string sounds], and when he opens the door there's another one. Anytime someone runs up the stairs, there's a series of notes moving upward [mimics strings playing from low to high].
In films, you don't do that, since it would look silly. Unless you're John Williams, the only guy who could score a guy just looking at a toothbrush. In video games, though, there's almost complete scoring from the word go. So all of the musical contributors contributed in the traditional way that you'd add to Halo. Marty O'Donnell, who's sort of this grand poobah if you will, he's sort of like the Wizard of Oz, makes those final judgments as to how he uses the score that people wrote. He's the guy, he's the one who puts it in.