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Some time ago I made a ranking of the best ten tracks from the Silent Hill series, this time it will be my another favourite game series – BioShock. Utopian cities for the rich and exclusive ones – the underwater Rapture and Columbia in the sky are fascinating worlds which resonate with the player’s emotions, and the outstanding and immersive story is, among the dynamic gameplay, the main advantage of these games. Though equally important is the beautiful music by Garry Schyman.
Garry Schyman returned to composing music for games in 2005 with the soundtrack to Destroy All Humans!
This experienced composer for film and TV decided in the nineties to make music for video games as well and wrote a soundtrack for the game Voyeur, one of the first orchestral scores for a video game. Shortly after he left the business for ten years because as a composer working with live orchestra he was not able to show his potential due to then low budget for the music production in games and the imposed low quality of such music.
Garry Schyman returned to composing music for games in 2005 with the soundtrack to Destroy All Humans! yet he is recognised the most for his scores to the BioShock trilogy. Its soundtrack is typically orchestral, with very climatic arrangements and beautiful strings solo parts. From the three soundtracks I have chossen mostly lyrical compositions with the leading parts of the strings, like Pairbond or Elizabeth but there are also battle themes such as The Songbird or the aleatoric Dr. Steinman. But the real icing on the cake is the piano study of madness – Cohen’s Masterpiece. Feel free to listen to the ranking.
