Bungie and the Beatle: The Paul McCartney story

polygon.com:

In March 2011, Lev Chapelsky was on his way to watch his friend and client, Marty O’Donnell, give a talk at the Game Developers Conference when he took the most important phone call of his career.

This was a life-changing phone call not just for Chapelsky, but for Halo composer O’Donnell and his colleagues at Bungie, the video game studio where he worked as audio director. Bungie was working on its next big game, and wanted it to be an even bigger success than its genre-defining Halo series.

Destiny was the studio’s most ambitious project to date: the world’s first shared-world first-person shooter, where players could drop in and out of cooperative missions set across vast landscapes on various planets. Bungie had released five Halo games between 2001 and 2010, but its bold aims for Destiny involved an ambitious 10-year plan of new content across a single game.

The music for Destiny needed to be similarly ambitious, requiring musical themes that would evolve with the game over its 10-year lifespan. As the game was still in the early stages of development, O’Donnell had started piecing together musical ideas influenced by its themes and artwork. One concept involved The Traveler, a sentient sphere at the heart of Destiny’s story, sending communication signals to Earth that had been misinterpreted as music.

What would that music sound like? O’Donnell had wondered. This question had led to the foundations of Music of the Spheres, a 48-minute orchestral suite that O’Donnell had been working on with the understanding it would be used as a ‘musical prequel’ to Destiny. His melodies would be the musical palette that millions of gamers would use to paint their own imaginings of Destiny’s world before they played the game,