Interview with Garry Schyman
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Garry Schyman
American composer who scored 1980s TV such as The A-Team, then games including Destroy All Humans!, BioShock and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. He teaches game scoring at USC.
Source: KIWI TALKZ on YouTube
These answers are taken from #93 - Garry Schyman Interview (Bioshock, Shadow Of Mordor, Film, Composing, Voice Acting, USC etc.) on KIWI TALKZ's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What do you enjoy most about composing?
I've never been asked to write more interesting music than in video games. None of the television or film scores that I wrote were anywhere near as interesting as a BioShock or a Shadow of Mordor or Dante's Inferno or Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis I wrote in a style that's reminiscent of the early 20th century, Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, expressionist music, and used a style of singing that's quite unique called Sprechstimme. You'd never get to do that in a film. So I'm still just sort of blown away at how creative I'm able to be, and I love that. That really feeds my creative spirit.
If I decided to retire, financially I could do that. That's not a problem. But I continue to work because I absolutely adore and love writing music. If I wasn't working, I'd be really wondering what I was doing with my life.
What was a great moment for you as a composer?
I knew that video games were becoming an important entertainment format, but I wasn't a gamer. When I did get involved [with Destroy All Humans!], the technology had advanced where I didn't have to write code. I just had to write music. I was sort of taken aback by how interesting gaming had become. I was like the kid on the farm coming into the big city: really, you can do that? That's really cool. I was really kind of blown away.
And I enjoyed it very much, and the game was successful, and my music was nominated for some awards, and I was like, this is a cool thing, I want to get involved. So I really made an affirmative effort to involve myself in gaming. I went to the Game Developers Conference. 2005 was the first one I attended, and I've only missed once or twice since then.
How did your career as a composer unfold?
I started in the 80s scoring shows like The A-Team and Magnum, P.I. and The Greatest American Hero. I studied at USC and graduated with a degree in music composition and with the absolute desire to become a film and television composer. Games were not an option back then. They just weren't technically advanced enough.
I did score some games in the early 90s for Philips Interactive, on a format called CD-i. A friend of mine was a producer there. That company went out of business, and I didn't score any games again until, purely by happenstance, my agent sent a resume over to THQ on a fax machine. A woman who was an executive there, Rachel, said, I know him. I hadn't seen her in years, but she was my girlfriend's roommate from college. She said you should listen to this guy's stuff, and that got me an opportunity to score Destroy All Humans! That was really my entry into the modern gaming industry.
The same audio director, Emily Ridgway, went on to Irrational Games in Boston, which was making BioShock, and she invited me to score it.
What advice do you have for new composers?
First of all, it is critical to understand that it is a unique industry. The crossover from film and television into gaming is very minimal. It's almost a completely unique set of people, and you have to create contacts in that industry. You have to meet them.
Everyone has a unique way of entry. There's no standard. Maybe in the 1950s in Hollywood you would start working at a studio as an orchestrator, and if you did well they'd give you a short, then a B movie. There was a system, but there's no system really now. You're going to find that low-budget independents are going to be more risk-takers, because they don't have any money, so you can get experience. Every now and then one of those blows up and becomes really successful, and then your music can get recognized.
You have to be very focused and very serious about it, and maybe a little lucky. It doesn't hurt. You've got to be there meeting people and honing your skills and learning and scoring any damn thing that comes your way. You've got to be realistic, but be ambitious at the same time.
Has your career as a composer progressed the way you expected?
I used to think I wanted to win an Academy Award, and I've come to think, no, thank you. I wouldn't change anything. If I could be working on big films, I'd rather be doing what I'm doing right now. It's just such a great place to be working, both creatively and in terms of stress.
The offers don't come in all the time. They come in enough to keep me busy. There are projects that I pitched for, literally wrote demos for, and somebody else got them, and I thought I would have done a terrific job on them. So I'm certainly not at that point where I'm getting everything I want. As the old Rolling Stones song goes, you don't always get what you want, but you get what you need. I kind of get what I need, which maybe is a good thing. It's the things you fight for that are the most satisfying. When you're challenged to write something different and you find it, and everyone seems pleased, that's the most satisfying thing from a composer's perspective.
How do you keep communication clear with directors and music supervisors?
For each version I give it a V title: V1, V2, V3. On the game I'm working on, they've been accepting a lot of V1s, which is a good sign. But last week I wrote a cue, and the music is quite good, but I kind of knew it was wrong for that. Sure enough, they came back and said, here's why this is not working. And I got really good feedback, which was quite helpful, which I wish I had gotten earlier. That permitted me to rewrite that cue, which I just delivered today.
On BioShock 2 I went up to Novato once at the beginning of the process and spent the day with the team. After that, the audio director said what he needed and sent me movie files. Everything was done online or by phone.
I've worked with some Chinese companies, and sometimes, especially when you're trying to nail down a mood or a change that they're requesting, their words are not nuanced enough to be helpful. It can cause issues.
Who is your favorite composer, and why?
Bernard Herrmann is one of my favorite film composers of all time. On Destroy All Humans!, the audio director was a big fan of Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still, so that was sort of the model. It takes place in the 50s, so the idea was, let's do it like a 1950s sci-fi score, theremin and orchestra, played seriously but from the perspective of the 1950s.
When I was a kid, the old sci-fi and monster movies were on TV every Saturday night, and of course you'd hear the theremin, so I associate that sound with that era. It was really fun to write in the style of Monsieur Herrmann. As a matter of fact, the reason they hired me was because one of those early games I scored for Philips Interactive, recorded with an orchestra here in L.A., was in the style of Bernard Herrmann. I sent them that, and they said, this is exactly what we're looking for.
Tell me about a cue or score that was hard to get right. What was the project and why was it challenging?
[On BioShock] it took a while of experimenting and trying things. Emily, who has a great ear, had a great way of not making me feel intimidated, like I'm going to get fired. She'd say, yeah, that's really cool, try some more stuff. She was really letting me experiment. And she did say that she didn't want it to sound like any other film, television or game score. It had to be quite unique, which is kind of intimidating in and of itself. I recall being frustrated and wanting to find it more quickly than I actually did. But when it came, it couldn't be anything else. I sort of combined two or three different styles, and I think that is what made it unique.
BioShock Infinite was one of the most challenging scores I ever did. BioShock 2 was easy, and I actually think that score rivals or betters the original BioShock in overall quality. But BioShock Infinite needed to be different, and Ken Levine, the creative director, said that, and that too took some time and experimentation and failing and trying again to find it.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your credits.
The Cohen's Masterpiece piano piece [in BioShock], I composed that. I didn't play it. We hired a pianist. I do play the piano, and I probably could have learned it, but I didn't have the time. It's quite a difficult piece.
When I was at USC, I had a piano teacher there, Bernardo Segall. He was from Argentina, a real interesting character. Besides being a fabulous concert pianist, he also scored a lot of television shows, including Columbo, and he would play his own piano at the recording sessions. The first scoring sessions I ever went to in L.A. were at Universal Studios, where he would record for the Columbo series.
I've taught scoring for video games at USC for about 10 years. When I first started, a good percentage of the students were just interested in scoring film and television and were not interested in video games. Now it's almost the opposite. A number of students are saying, I don't want to do film and television, I just want to score video games.
What are some of your professional goals for the future?
I've always kind of had the fantasy of scoring a western film, a really good western. So maybe a game that was a western would be kind of cool to do. I didn't even think that anyone would create a game based on Franz Kafka's books, so who would have thought.
Just something where they're asking me to be creative, and they're open to ideas that I might present, not too locked in stylistically. You're still scoring their game, so they're entitled to their input, and they have the last word. But the more creative people are open to really different approaches to their scores.
I've been introduced to some of the people that make first-person shooters. I'd be open to it, sure, if they wanted me to do something unique for them.
Garry Schyman's Full Biography
Composer Garry Schyman's award-winning music can be heard in nearly every audio-visual media, including feature films, prime-time television, and video games. His haunting orchestral scores for the globally acclaimed video games BioShock, BioShock 2, and BioShock Infinite have earned him multiple awards, including top honors for Best Original Score from the British Academy of Film & Television (BAFTA) and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.
As one of the world's most celebrated composers of video game music, Schyman is notable for his versatility of style and unique ability to fluidly draw from multiple eclectic sources of inspiration. He captured the fantasy world of Tolkien for the adventure game Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor (nominated for a BAFTA award) and Middle-Earth: Shadow of War and paid playful homage to '50s sci-fi with his score for the 2005 game Destroy All Humans! (followed by two sequels). He accelerated heartbeats with his thunderous orchestral scores in action games like Resistance: Retribution and Dante's Inferno and gave a nod to the hypnotic style of Bernard Herrmann in the mystery game Voyeur. Schyman's score for the virtual reality game Torn was released in Aug. 2018 as a soundtrack on Varèse Sarabande Records.