Freeworld: Interview with Wilbert Roget II (Bustatunez ), composer for FreeWorld

Your roving reporter for FreeWorld Warcry was lucky enough to pin down Tunez for an interview. In it, he shares where his inspiration came from, his background, how he came to be a part of the FreeWorld group, and how he plans to integrate his music into FreeWorld.

Here are the questions and answers:

Arwen: Tunez, what influenced you to write music?

Wilbert: I'd been a classical piano student since I was about five years old and began improvising on the instrument even before then. After a few years, I started recording my improvisations, but I never wrote anything down until about high school age. I started with MIDI at about the same time as I started writing scored music, and immediately took an interest in game and film music...which pretty much brings me to the present.

Arwen: What led up to your joining the Freeworld team?

Wilbert: Well, I met Scott [Scott Morton, former composer for FreeWorld] because we were both members of AudioGANG (www.audiogang.com). He took an interest in some music I wrote for another game I was composing for, a medieval CTF that never got finished. Later on, he announced that he was leaving FW, and that he was looking for a replacement. I thought the project was interesting and showed a lot of promise, so I dropped him a line and some tunes.

Arwen: I have heard some of the songs you wrote and they are great. What sort of music can we look forward to hearing from you for FreeWorld?

Wilbert: While I don't necessarily want to take a completely different direction from Scott's music (which stressed a "subtle", ambient approach to game music), I feel that my musical style is more extroverted by nature. Right now, I'm trying to keep my own musical opinions solid while also paying respect to his original vision. To do this, I'm separating the songs into two different categories--world introduction cues, which are brash musical paintings of the world as a whole; and random area cues, which would correlate more to Scott's subtle underscoring technique.

Arwen: Does this mean some of Scott's songs will be taken out or simply that Wilbert's music will be added to Scott's?

Wilbert: My biggest concern is in developing a voice of my own while not impeding Scott's work, so I really wouldn't want to create a situation where his stuff would have to be taken out of the game.

Arwen: They say that knowing the type of music a composer favors can tell you a lot about his own music. who is your favorite composer and why?

Wilbert: I'd have to say Igor Stravinsky, not just because of the music itself but rather because he had a unifying aesthetic to all his music, despite his extremely diverse output. You can listen to his Russian folk-inspired music and his jazz-inspired work, and it just always sounds like Stravinsky. I'm not sure there's any other composers who are so diverse yet so distinctive at the same time.

Arwen: Many composers favor only one instrument, while others are prolific and excel at many different ones. What is your preference here?

Wilbert: Actually I'm more of a composer and orchestral/choral conductor than a performer, but my main instrument is piano. Since my senior year of high school, I started teaching myself flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, horn, and violin, not for performance but rather just to become a better orchestrator.

Arwen: Give us your two cents on the state of music in the video game industry, Tunez.

Wilbert: Basically all I want to say is that I think that the video game industry needs to go through a period where it at least considers itself to be a form of high art, as opposed to commercial art (much like the film industry has in previous generations). This should have ramifications on the music as well; personally I believe that if I ever write a new song, and don't think it's better in some significant way than everything I've written before, it's a failure. Basically I just think that if the industry as a whole were to adopt that kind of an attitude, we could see creativity and innovation at a whole new level.

Arwen: Do you have any shout outs, Tunez?

Wilbert: I'd like to give a shout out to my friends over at VGMusic and AudioGANG, and to my fellow composers who've backed me up every step of the way (Jerad, Eric, and Freddie, you might not know each other but you know who you are ;).