Grant Blog

I’m honoured (and suprised!) to have been nominated for a Hollywood Media in Music Award in the Original Score category for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Lots of other great scores from really great composers in there as well so I’ve been very lucky to have been included!!

http://www.hmmawards.org/?page_id=2551

Well here I am in LA. It’s all been a bit sudden …… !

After the 38 studio’s meltdown I was lucky enough to get some work contract composing for Zynga for a game that should be out sometime in October (I think). It’s been good fun actually, quite a lot of ex BHG-ers are there so it was great to see some of them again.

Then out of the blue I got a job offer from Spark Unlimited in LA, so we moved over on August 6th! I was sad to leave Baltimore as I’d made lots of good friends there but you have to go where the work is don’t you.

So it’s on with the adventure …. I’ll let you know how I get on at the new company, should be exciting!

Cheers,

Grant.

Well, it’s been a while I know. It’s been an interesting few months I can tell you. Reckonings release all went well, it’s probably sold over 1.5 million by now, VGChartz seem to think that it’s still selling 10,000 a week, even tho’ they think it’s sold under 1.5 million, which I’m pretty sure it hasn’t.

It was pretty upsetting to see BHG go down so fast, we really were days away from a new publishing deal for Reckoning 2, we’d done quite a bit of work on it too. If the Governor of Rhode Island hadn’t mentioned the word “solvency” in connection with 38 Studios maybe it would have been a different story …. who knows … one things for sure tho’ …. after that event it was all downhill from there, everyone who was involved with us walked away and waited to see what happened.

It was rough the first few weeks after that, fortunately I had booked my yearly family vacation in the UK and I was also going to do some gigs with the old band I used to play for, Little Angels, culminating at the Download Festival ….. it was fantastic fun to do it all again!

I was lucky enough to get some contract composing work when I got back to the US for Zynga, I’m still doing that at the moment, it’s for a game that should be hitting Facebook in October I think so you can hear some new music from me pretty soon.

I have another development that’s going on at the moment that I’ll tell  you about soon ….. !!

Onwards and upwards!

Damn, this piece is driving me mad. I don’t want to go down the route of “let’s add some taiko drum loops for the combat layer” …… heh! This used to be easy in the good old Nintendo cartridge days!

….. now I have a ten minute piece of music that will be my base layer for an ambient area, I need to write some more music that matches this piece so I can switch between layers depending on the action ….. hopefully!

Thinking about interactive music today, like in the good old Banjo Kazooie days. I think it might work, I’ll need to test it out a bit and see what happens …..

sometimes no matter what you do it just isn’t good enough is it eh ….. I mean ….. I try my best, that’s all you can do right!!!!!!!

Feeling thoroughly bloody miserable today for reasons I won’t disclose ……… bugger!

Actually writing some music today, it’s been a while ….heh! Trying to write an extra long piece, I’m up to ten minutes at the moment, I think I can squeeze a few more out!!

God I’m terrible at blogging!

Let’s see, what has happened recently. Well Reckoning is out of course and it’s sold somewhere north of a million copies so that’s good news, the soundtrack picked up some good reviews from movie music sites who’ve never heard of me or any of the games I’ve done which is also great. I was really trying to give the game a movie-esque quality in the music so it’s good that people picked up on that.

The DLC packs are selling well too, I’m hoping to sort out a way of giving the music away from these. Since none of it is on the CD I thought it might be nice to just let people download it, I’ll let you all know when I get some news on that.

So it’s back to work as usual …… heh!