WGE MAG: 49
“A lot of overlap exists out there because gaming in general tends to follow a specific type of dramatic storyline. That’s what the music is enhancing. We soon had this giant catalog of loopable music that was eight to ten minutes long, and we began to realize that this is videogame music...”
“Years ago, I joined a large live action role-playing game, or LARP,” she explains, “and the guy who was running the game asked me to provide music for it. That led to me thinking, ‘If he needs music for his game… maybe other people do, too?’ So after doing some research, I created Sonic Legends, initially to provide music for tabletop role-playing games – games like Dungeons & Dragons – as well as for LARPs.”
I’ve been drawn to music,” says Kovacs, currently working on the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. “It’s extremely cliché to say that, but it’s true. I started playing piano at five years old, when I was in kindergarten; it was all I could do.”
“I think I was about six,” adds Carew, a graduate of Royal Conservatory program of Vancouver who composes for everything from “commercials to zombie films.” “Yes, six. That was when I saw Star Wars. I didn’t know about film music, but I saw the film I went insane listening to the movie score – that’s what my dad tells me. I kept saying, I want to make ‘like that; like that.’ He asked, ‘You want to be like Princess Leia? Do you want to be an actress?” And I said, ‘No! The music, the music!!’”
Ollsin, whose work includes scores for the game Skate and Tony Hawk’s Boom Boom Sabotage, adds. “I was self-taught on the piano. My parents bought me a Casio. You can go pretty far with your imagination on the Casio.”
Lieberman’s story is similar. She would turn her creativity and early exposure to filmmaking (Her father, director Jeff Lieberman, helmed the films Remote Control and Squirm) toward music for media, eventually earning her masters degree in Music Technology and Film Scoring from NYU. A talented musician even before college (performing regularly on Celtic harp), Lieberman was now poised to take her impressive skills in a new direction. All it took was a curious introduction to a certain game to set the stage for Sonic Legends.
Thus Sonic Legends was born, though it wasn’t long before Lieberman recognized a games market niche yearning to be filled. As more and more video games began appearing on traditional and also newer platforms—tablets, smartphones, apps, social media—Lieberman saw that those developers could benefit from licensing reasonably priced music from a large and easy-to-access on-line library. She also grasped that music suited to tabletop fantasy games worked just as well for digital fantasy games.
“A lot of overlap exists out there because gaming in general tends to follow a specific type of dramatic storyline. That’s what the music is enhancing. We soon had this giant catalog of loopable music that was eight to ten minutes long, and we began to realize that this is videogame music; this music can used by videogames and other systems and we should make it available. That’s why I started the Sonic Legends licensing division.
To read the extended Sonic Legends article visit:
http://www.worldgamingexecutives.com/page/sonic-legends
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