You've done music for games and for films - Are there great differences between setting a game or a film to music?
Cris: The biggest difference is that movies are linear and games are not. This means that unless you are watching an in-game cut scene, the gameplay is unscripted. What takes one player 15 minutes to complete may take another one 45 minutes. This makes gamers very sensitive to music. We have to compose in such a way that you aren’t annoyed by hearing the same track 20 times in a row. In Hellgate, we wrote numerous intensity levels of every single cue in the game for just this purpose. Depending on what’s happening in the game our music will be more ambient or more aggressive. But it’s still all related to the same cue. This almost gives the illusion that we’re scoring to picture.