'Mozart would have made video game music': composer Eímear Noone on a winning art form

Eímear Noone got into composing and conducting video game music by accident. One day, while studying music at Trinity College Dublin, a fourth-year student came to the bar she was drinking in with members of the college chapel choir and offered them a few quid to help with the orchestration on a project of his. "I have a vivid memory of sitting on a studio floor somewhere in Dublin writing choral parts with my pals and then singing them," she says. "Six months later my brother calls me in a complete tizzy and says, 'Did you work on Metal Gear Solid?' I was like, 'No!' He says, 'Well, I'm looking at your name on the screen credits right now.' And sure enough, the session she had contributed to for beer money was the soundtrack to Hideo Kojima's blockbusting adventure game. "Years later I was at the Bird's Nest in Beijing at the Olympic Stadium conducting this very piece of music," she says. Noone is now a hugely successful film and video game composer, having contributed scores for directors such as Gus Van Sant and Joe Dante, and for games, World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Hearthstone. In November, she's presenting her second series of High Score, Classic FM's agenda-setting programme dedicated to game music. Underappreciated outside of game fandom for years, the genre is now huge business with dedicated orchestras playing sold-out global concert tours. And Noone is a passionate advocate – very keen to explore and explain the unique elements of the art form. There is, of course, a foundational similarity between game and film scores – they are both composed to accompany and accentuate screened action. But while a film score needs to accompany a two-hour linear experience with specific cues and events, video game music must be there for many hours of play. Most open-word action adventures, the likes of Assassin's Creed Origins, Witcher 3 and Final Fantasy XV, offer over 100 hours of narrative, but many players will spend much longer exploring. Music scores also have two different roles in games: they accompany the non-interactive cinematic sequences that set up the story and occur throughout a game – sort of like short animated movie sequences; and they provide background music while you play. "Cinematic are scored very similarly to a movie or an animated film.