Sound Screen: Interview with Video Game Music Pioneer Brian Schmidt

Brian Schmidt

The story of how music became an integral part of video games is best told through the perspective of someone who bridges the worlds of art and technology. There are only a select few who truly do that, and one of them is Brian Schmidt. 

From coding simple melodies into early computer chips, to bringing music to mechanical pinball machines, to composing and encoding 8-bit tracks for cartridge-based games, and eventually writing and recording full orchestral scores for massive open-world titles, Schmidt has done just about everything related to video game music. His contributions also extend beyond composition. He is the founder of Game Sound Con, the trailblazing industry conference dedicated to game audio professionals. 

And he is still pushing forward. Most recently, Schmidt partnered with Michael Mendheim of Digital Dreams Entertainment to launch the sequel to the cult-classic, darkly humorous sports franchise Mutant Football League. 

We spoke with Schmidt about his career, the evolution of music in video games, and how he incorporated APM Music tracks alongside his own compositions while developing Mutant Football League 2 (MFL2). 

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 Listen to the interview

About Brian Schmidt 

Brian Schmidt is a pioneering video game composer, sound designer, and audio technologist with a career spanning more than three decades. He got his start in the late ’80s at Williams Electronics, creating memorable music and sound for iconic arcade and pinball titles like NARC and Black Knight 2000. Since then, he’s contributed to well over 100 games, helped shape modern game audio through his work on Xbox sound technology at Microsoft, and is also the founder of GameSoundCon, one of the leading conferences for game music and sound.