The first Mafia game came out all the way back in 2002, during a packed year of game releases. Fighting amongst other powerhouses like Kingdom Hearts, Splinter Cell, Ratchet & Clank, and even Grand Theft Auto, Mafia still managed to garner plenty of positive reception. Mafia 3 was the most recent iteration in the franchise, 14 years later in 2016, which marked a very different direction for the franchise. However this year the series returns to its roots with Mafia: Definitive Edition, a full remake from the ground up of the first game utilizing the same gameplay engine as Mafia 3.
Various improvements have been made to the original game, but the largest improvement comes with the soundtrack. In an interview with GameRant, Mafia: Definitive Edition‘s Composer Jesse Harlin sat down and spoke of the various thought processes in crafting a completely new original soundtrack for the classic game. Coming off of the very different score in Mafia 3, Harlin took the basis of a traditional orchestral approach, and expanded upon that with a unique melodic inspiration that served as the basis for Mafia: Definitive Edition‘s score.
GR: You had previously worked on the Mafia 3 soundtrack, can you talk about transitioning from more of a rockabilly southern sound to the opera-like music in Mafia 1?
H: It was a big shift for sure, Jim Bonney and I moving away from a Blues score in Mafia 3. We spent two weeks in Nashville recording guitars, harmonica, organs, step dancers, body percussion. That was great just trying to do something different. Then working on the Mafia: Definitive Edition, I like to start by getting into the heads of the characters, to the point of overthinking it. As in where the characters come from, reading the game’s script, getting to know the characters well. In Mafia‘s story, a lot of the characters come from Italy, Sicily, and were born at the end of the 19th century.
So the soundtrack became mostly orchestral, since Mafia was more of a Shakespearean Tragedy of a story. This literary, tragic arc in a classic setting, the orchestra made perfect sense. Having to figure out what the right orchestral tone is for the game, the very first piece of in-game music I was working on, I found it after about 30 seconds of written down music. This little melodic phrase, a little rhythmic motif popped out that sounds like a classical ballet, and so I thought what if I wrote a ballet for a shooter? Elegance against the super violent, more like an opera than ballet, so that’s where “Bullet Opera” came from.
GR: There’s an overall sense of foreboding throughout the entire soundtrack, is it meant to be full of melancholy and tragedy? How did you approach character themes like Sarah or the Salieri Crime Family?
H: For a composer, starting a new Mafia project, the creative director in particular actually really liked thematic scores. For all of the catchy themes in the game, what’s going to be my hook? What’s the thing that I can latch on to as a memorable theme? I wanted to create a hook with just one note, a rhythmic single note, almost like a heartbeat or pulse of dread. That sense of foreboding comes from that motif throughout the soundtrack.
Buried in one of the action tracks, there’s a two-bar chunk of music that inspired the rest of Mafia‘s soundtrack. The track was called “One Twitch Away,” and it starts around the 1:47 mark. This classical stage or ballerina section sounded nothing like a film score, it was something new. The track was called “One Twitch Away,” and it starts around the 1:47 mark. This classical stage or ballerina section sounded nothing like a film score, it was something new.
And for Sarah’s theme, I figured I should pull in some jazz influences. For the main character, moments with Sarah are the only time where he’s relaxed, there’s a cooler vibe to it. Whereas with moments with older characters like Don Salieri, I’d pull in some Italian folk music influences like the Mandolin strings for tremolo, a single note that shakes back and forth and is struck over and over again.
GR: There are moments of levity and almost whimsicalness throughout the soundtrack, like in “A Bit of a Situation,” It almost sounds like a Final Fantasy game. What was the inspiration for that particular track?
H: Yeah it did come out of nowhere a bit, when I was putting together an asset list and musical cues for the game in Nashville and Prague, the two places where the soundtrack was scored. Got a message from the [Mafia] dev. team on a Friday that basically said “Hey, we’ve got this race that’s in the game,” this notorious race in Mafia, “This is what we were thinking to have.” They sent over two gameplay videos, and against those videos was Tchaikovsky, some late 19th century really elaborate classical song. “Could you get something like this in for next week?”
So after spending about an hour, I’m thinking “What the hell am I going to do? How am I going to do this?” So I obsessed and wrote furiously all through the weekend. It’s the only cue in the game that’s not in the same key as the rest of the soundtrack. It changes key throughout, so I went crazy with it, modulating in keys, using C-sharp, which is a terrible key for orchestral film scores. I listened to it over and over again. I think musicians deal with a degree of imposter syndrome sometimes. So I said, “You know what, you wrote that thing in a weekend, you are a composer, you can do it.”
GR: The game’s original theme largely remains intact at first, but does divert towards your style or interpretation of it, how formative was the original soundtrack for you?
H: Well, it wasn’t very formative. 2K came to me very early on, and the first conversation was “we’re redoing the game, we want a new score for the game.” That decision was made before they approached me, we’re going to create a new score. I believe I only listened to the original score, start to finish, twice. I figured well, I better familiarize myself with the game, so I listened all the way through it. Then I listened to it again a week or two ago, after Mafia‘s [Definitive Edition] soundtrack was done and mixed, I wondered how close we are so I listened to the original score.
It’s interesting because the only piece of his score I used was his main theme, which was part of the original cinematic in the 2002 game. I did end up using that core of the original main theme, the beginning of it, as a theme throughout the score more than the original game used the main theme. The main theme was used a lot throughout various other songs, incorporated as a thematic element. I wanted to keep that familiarity from the original game spread throughout. There were three different [original] versions of a new main theme, but I figured let’s just start the whole new main theme with a quote from the original main theme instead.
GR: Alongside that, was there any mafia-related media from pop culture that inspired the soundtrack, like the Godfather?
H: I actually tried to steer clear of any other inspirations from crime-related media. One game I worked on before Mafia, a game called CounterSpy on the PlayStation, had a 1960s spy theme. I wrote a cue, not listening to anything like John Barry’s James Bond stuff, and I sent the written material to Sony. I was thinking about the cues I’d sent after, and I realized “Oh my god, I’ve accidentally re-written Bond music again.” (laughs) I had to rewrite and reproduce the cue for an E3 trailer just weeks before the show. So no, I try to avoid inspiration from other sources like that.
GR: When you say you wished the soundtrack would evoke a “Bullet Opera” sound, is there a particular reason why there’s no literal opera track in the soundtrack? Was it because that would be too cliche?
H: Actually, the decision was way more practical than that. It was more of a desire to not fight for the sonic frequency space that is going to be filled in by important player feedback. Gun sounds, reloading, what you need to hear while you’re playing. Anything that makes people have to reach for the volume slider in the menu for the game’s music is bad. I tried to be thoughtful about that approach, especially when discussing with the game’s director. The development team sent some video capture of early gameplay footage, and there was a point when we were going to create a prototype interactive music system. But in the end that was the primary concern.
[End.]
Mafia: Definitive Edition releases on September 25, 2020, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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