My favorite soundtrack story of all time has just got to be how John Carpenter decided to score Escape from New York by himself. Apparently, as the movie was being produced, the question of music was raised. Carpenter asked "well, how much is that gonna cost?" and – upon receiving a ballpark quote – went out and hired sound engineer Alan Howarth, who had his own synthesizer (in an interview, Howarth called himself "the cheapest guy (Carpenter) could get"). Then, with Carpenter composing and Howarth manning the instrument, the two of 'em made what has turned out to be one of the most basic – iconic – movie scores of all time.

I bring that up because, not for the first time, as I was listening to "A Better Beginning" from Mass Effect: Andromeda as I worked (which is about all I can do, now that the Origin-EA-App Debacle has run its course), I couldn't help but wonder how its composer – on a 200 million USD budget, with the Nashville Scoring Orchestra at his beck and call and a 19-strong music department – couldn't do a better job than two guys in a wee studio with a single synthesizer between 'em.

Not that it's a bad tune: "A Better Beginning" does a perfectly serviceable job of setting up the premise of a Grand Adventure... But, for all its instruments, effects and myriad bells and whistles, it is a bit – I don't know – mundane? I mean, if you come right down to it, the track keeps repeating the same motif, but just piling more instruments onto every iteration. Put into words, it's like hearing "thing; promising thing; Big thing; HUGE thing; ENORMOUS thing; ... thing." Hardly what I'd call inspiring and not at all singular: pretty much every track on the Andromeda OST is like that.

Whereas the soundtrack to 1993's commercial-flop-turned-cult-hit, Hired Guns, still sends shivers down my spine. It's that good.

So how is it that modern composers, with all their advantages, can't hold a candle to the tunes of yesteryear?

Training and experience?

John Paesano, the composer for Andromeda, studied at the Conservatoire de Paris and Berklee College of Music, has scored Invincible and Daredevil (the television series), Detroit: Become Human and even nabbed a BAFTA for Spider Man: MIles Morales. So he definitely knows what he's doing.

I couldn't find a single thing about Brian Johnston, other than the fact that he composed the music for Hired Guns and three Lemmings games, while at DMA Design.

Budget and technology?

Exact figures for the musical aspect of Mass Effect: Andromeda were nebulous, but the entire game was made on something to the tune of 200 million USD – definitely enough to hire an orchestra, any gadgetry known to man, competent staff and even Edmonton-based DJs who provided 21 tracks for the various clubs found in the game.

If Andromeda's budgetary specifics were nebulous, information for Hired Guns was practically nonexistent, but the 90s were hardly rock-and-roll years for computer game developers (I watched a documentary about DMA Design while preparing for this piece, which included a brief tour of their facilities: lavish, they were not).

Monetary constraints aside, Johnston was also limited by the Amiga 500's meager (by modern standards) technical specs. With no external hard drive and the game residing on five (if memory serves) 1.76 Mb disks, a single MP4 file from Andromeda's soundtrack was larger than the whole Hired Guns game. And, anyway, poor old Amiga only had four sound channels to work with, so even if – by some physics-defying miracle – Johnston was able to fit a live music recording into storage, it could never be reproduced with anything approaching fidelity to the source material.

Talent and necessity?

Very much this, I think.

While I will not suggest that one of these composers is more talented than the other, I think their talents are different and a direct reflection of the environments that shaped them.

While Paesano probably had the more thorough musical education of the two, I'd be willing to bet a potato it was also the more constrained and formulaic. For all the vast resources at their disposal, the thing Big Universities are best at producing is Big University Thinkers: people who are very capable, in their own right, but also thoroughly institutionalized and not very original. It's a walking the designated trail versus carving your own path sorta thing...

Pair that with the fact that, by the time he was composing, Paesano was dealing with The Gaming Industry – with all of its committees, deadlines and expected returns on investment – and it's little wonder that what we got was something competent and grand and – instantly forgettable. What he delivered, in the end, was a product and – good or bad – we are so inundated with products, nowadays, that I think we eventually stop paying attention to them.

Johnston, on the other hand, may not have had the resources or the technology, but what he did have working for him was the freedom to experiment, a probable lack of oversight and the crushing necessity to Be Good. There were no million dollar budgets just laying around, after all; no orchestras or DJs or gimmicks to bail you out if you couldn't come up with a Good Idea. The only thing you could count on was coming up with a melody that worked.

And while the gaming industry of Johnston's time was very much an "anything goes if it works", wild west sorta place, I think that worked in his favor. Despite not playing the game all that much, 30 years later I can still "hear" any of Hired Guns' 11 tracks in my head – beginning to end.

Six years on, I can only recall two from Andromeda's 100+ hour playthrough and 18 track listing...

Summation

If it reads like I'm picking on Mr. Paesano and Mass Effect: Andromeda in particular – I'm not. It's just modern game music I heard most recently and decided to use for comparison. Neither is Hired Guns an outlier: so many games from the 1990s/Amiga era had such fantastic music I am convinced that particular time was simply most conducive to shaping talented composers. An era that paired a lack of technological capacity with ample opportunity to shine (provided, of course, you were good enough).

Don't believe me or simply disagree? Go on YouTube and have a listen to the opening track from SWIV. Or most of Jim Power in Mutant Planet. Or the opponent selection from Shufflepuck Cafe. Or anything you can stand from eerie, creepy Perihelion. Or Space Crusade. Or Lotus II. Or Utopia. Or Venus The Flytrap. Or Zool. Or Shadow of the Beast. Or Awesome...

Or simply find the full OST for Turrican II: The Final Fight and have Herr Huelsbeck blow your socks off.

Fun Facts:

• -John Carpenter fell in love with synthesizers because they let him "sound big with just (a) keyboard"; used to working on no-budget productions, he took to composing scores himself to save money, admitting "not that I was great, but I could do them and I could be effective with simple means";

• -Hired Guns was illustrated by a grand total of two artists: Graeme Anderson, who – over the course of two and a half years – drew the environments, enemies, characters, weapons, food and two additional screens in Deluxe Paint III (oof); and David "Oz" Osborne, who scanned-in and edited the location loading screens from real world photos;

• -a Hired Guns sequel running the Unreal Engine was made but never published for the PC; judging by screens from a leaked ISO in 2007, the fact it was never released is (sadly) probably a good thing;

• -DMA Design went on to make the original Grand Theft Auto game in 1997 and exists to this day as Rockstar North;