After nearly two decades of writing music for a galaxy far, far away, it can be argued that Gordy Haab is the most prolific composer in the Star Wars universe, John Williams included. Haab, who’s created the scores for Star Wars games including The Old Republic, Battlefront I and II, Squadrons, Jedi: Fallen Order, and Jedi: Survivor, just finished work on EA and Bit Reactor’s Star Wars: Zero Company. Now, Haab is revealing exactly how both his and Williams’s previous work directly influenced the music of the new XCOM-style game.
I sat down with Haab for an exclusive interview immediately following Star Wars Zero Company’s release, where he revealed that he considers the game’s score to be a “sequel” to other Clone Wars-era stories.
“When I wrote the score for [2017's] Battlefront II, I felt like I was really onto something. [With] Battlefront I, the assignment was to write the B-sides for the original scores. So [afterward] I really sort of branched off and started doing my own thing. So picking up [with Zero Company], I almost wanted to think of it as using Battlefront II as sort of my springboard. My parameter was ‘What would be the sequel to that?’ I wanted to have that sparkle that the Prequel era music has, but also have my personal aesthetic stamp on it.”
Haab also revealed that at a certain point after years spent working on Star Wars, he was able to throw out the Lucasfilm rule book.
“In the beginning, Lucasfilm's direction was always ‘Be original, do your own thing, but the north star is from the original films,’” Haab says. “But then with the onset of multiple shows and games having their own original stories, that’s changed quite a bit. Each project I've worked on has had a different set of walls. When I worked on Star Wars: Hunters, I did the whole thing with an orchestra and a heavy metal band. That would not work in [Zero Company] or the Jedi series, [which is] much darker. It's much heavier, and it's got a lot of horror.”
Haab, who’s also composed music for multiple Indiana Jones games, including 2024’s Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, says he’s flattered by being associated with John Williams’s iconic music, but that the comparison does create a sense of pressure.
“In the beginning it was intimidating,” Haab says. “I felt that sort of pressure to try to live up to the original scores from the films. The ones that inspired me to even become a composer in the first place. I take those moments, I see those things happen, I absorb them, and then I quickly just forget about it and treat it as noise.
“It's almost like winning an award. I accept that award, which I consider that to be. That's a huge compliment to be spoken in the same sentence as my musical hero. But then I quickly put it away and say, ‘Don’t rest on those laurels. Do your thing, get back to work, create your voice within the franchise.’”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/star-wars-zero-company-composer-gordy-haab-interview
