Frank Klepacki
Frank Klepacki is a composer.
Klepacki learned drums as a child and was hired by Westwood Studios as a composer at seventeen, which is a ridiculous sentence that happens to be true. He arrived early enough to score Dune II in 1992, one of the games that set the template for real time strategy, and stayed on to write for the Legend of Kyrandia and Lands of Lore series and Westwood's Blade Runner adaptation.
Then Command and Conquer. The music he wrote for it, and for Red Alert in 1996, did something almost no game score had tried: instead of underlining the action it set the tempo for it. Hell March is the one everybody knows, an industrial rock march with real drums under it that arrives before you have clicked anything and tells you what kind of war this is going to be. The Red Alert score won two awards, and it is the reason a series about base building has a fanbase that argues about drum sounds.
What holds up is that the work is played rather than programmed. Klepacki is a drummer writing for a medium that mostly ran on sequencers, and the difference is audible: the tracks breathe, drop out, come back harder, and loop for an entire campaign without turning into wallpaper, which is the actual job description for strategy game music.
Music (4)
Games (6)
Where to start with Frank Klepacki
Start with the Command & Conquer: Red Alert soundtrack, which stands up as a record on its own and is the least demanding way in: no install, no mission briefing, just the reason people still talk about him.
Then take the games in the order the music got braver. Command & Conquer is the austere original, all tension and metallic pulse. Command & Conquer: Red Alert is where the guitars arrive. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 is the loudest and the most fun, and if it strikes you as silly, that is rather the point. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun is the moody outlier and the one people underrate. Dune II: Battle For Arrakis is the historical document, worth an hour to hear what he could do before the budgets arrived, and Command & Conquer: Renegade is the odd one, a shooter inside a strategy universe, where the score has to work to a completely different rhythm.
Frank Klepacki on CrossBinge
- Companion guide: Westwood Studios: The Studio That Invented Real-Time Strategy