Like any good movie, of course, visuals are only part of the story. Casey Hudson is proud of how hard BioWare worked to integrate the musical score into Mass Effect 2's opening, to both call back to old themes from the first Mass Effect and show off new themes.
"Like scoring a movie, [in games] we direct the visuals first and then tell the composer to capture certain feelings. If it's something very important, like the beginning or the ending, we will actually plan out the scenes and music in mockups, editing images and music to show how we will hit certain beats."
Going back to the Fallout 3 opening, it's easy to see how the song choice is integral to setting a powerful scene of devastation. You can probably imagine that scene working, however, with another piece of period music coming out of a tinny radio speaker. This is a harder imaginative leap with the opening cinematic for Civilization IV:
The opening video itself is far from surprising. Guess what? Civ IV is about history. Though the camera work is nice, the cinematic is one that stands out because of the music, Baba Yetu -- a theme composed by Christopher Tin. The song itself isn't heard at any great length in the opening, but it's the main menu theme. What we get in the intro is a prologue for that theme, full of majesty.
"I got involved with Civ IV after [lead designer] Soren Johnson, an old Stanford roommate of mine, contacted me about doing the music for the opening," Tin recalls. They wanted an African feel, and Johnson knew that Tin had worked with the a capella group Talisman.
"Oftentimes, you'll see something -- an image, a film clip -- and the notes will just immediately start flowing," says Tin. "Right away, when they showed me the opening shot of Earth from outer space, I knew that I wanted to start with a low female vocal -- something serene and motherly. That opening theme came almost immediately."
The composition leads into the main menu music, of which Tin says "The song was meant to play over footage of the Earth as seen from outer space -- with the occasional sunrise bursting over the horizon. I knew that I wanted to give it a cyclical structure." But the sum effect of the music is so powerful and works so well with the imagery, that something was lost when developer Firaxis Games crafted new opening videos for the expansion packs.
For the Civ 4 expansion videos, Firaxis went with the montage -- a series of historical images that reflect material from the game without really demonstrating what separates this new history from the old one. Where Tin's music was enough to uplift otherwise pedestrian imagery, the score for the expansions' openings does nothing to make you want to revisit a movie you've seen before.
Fin
Circling back to my friend's love of the Rhapsody intro, it's hard not to see what she finds so enjoyable and why it works as an opening cinematic. The theme of the game is laid bare, so you are prepped for what to expect. The central interaction between the lead character and the fairy is revealed. As terrible as the music is to my ears (and most ears, I think), the chirpy tune certainly makes you want to see what's next, what all this setup is for.
Ultimately, BioWare's Hudson is right: All good openings -- whether in the form of self-contained movies or intros that stream straight into the gameplay -- are about the hooks they give you. Different genres require different hooks, and the artistry and science of the opening cinematic involves hitting your audience with the right ones.
My personal favorite? The Sims 2.
Troy Goodfellow is a freelance writer based in Maryland. He blogs about strategy games at Flash of Steel and hosts Three Moves Ahead, a weekly podcast about the same topic.
