Weekly dose of musical culture - video games

You're probably sick of hearing about Halo, but I can't help but feature the music in a WDoMC.

Martin O'Donnell is Bungie's (the creator of the Halo games) in-house music guru. Michael Salvatori is his partner in crime. All of the music, from Halo: Combat Evolved (CE) through Halo: Reach, is heavy on the orchestra and vocal ambiance, but includes a lot of rock and weird techno stuff too.

The first in this playlist below is Opening Suite. It's the first thing you hear when you start up Halo: CE.

Follow Our Brothers from Halo 3 is great. Starts out kind of dark and builds into a kind of heroic theme. One of my favorites.

The next two are the themes from Halo 2 and 3. I'm not entirely sure about the theme song for Reach, but Overture is what you listen to when hanging out in the menus.

So if you like orchestra music, you may enjoy this.

As for other video games, I haven't heard too many that seem to put as much effort into their soundtracks as Bungie does. But then again, I'm a Halo fanboy and don't play a wide variety of games. A lot of games just use popular artists/titles and some use a brother-in-law with his synthesizer.

Enjoy.