Best known for his densely percussive music for the revival of Battlestar Galactica, composer Bear McCreary makes no secret of his lifelong love of video games. If anything, that fixation is on display: a picture published on his blog several years ago reveals that the external hard drives containing the raw recording sound files of his sessions aren’t labeled with numbers or obvious names like “Galactica sessions”… instead, they’re named after characters from Capcom‘s Mega Man games, complete with colorful labels. So it’s fitting that Capcom should give McCreary his first shot at scoring a video game – but Dark Void definitely doesn’t sound like Mega Man.
For one thing, McCreary refused to back down on his requirements for a real orchestra, real percussionists, and so on; Dark Void‘s music budget almost certainly took off like it had a jetpack of its own… but hey, it’s Bear McCreary. Sales of the soundtrack album almost certainly recouped what was an unusually large music budget for a video game – even in this day and age of games whose costs run into the millions of dollars and years of development.
And the music itself? Put simply, if you loved McCreary’s music for the Galactica finale, Daybreak (which is also out on CD), you’ll dig Dark Void. The music is fairly different – there aren’t any melodic similarities between Galactica’s heroic musical warfare and Dark Void‘s wistful main theme. But the execution is similar: the same blend of orchestra, a wall of exotic percussion and unusual instruments gives it the same feel as Galactica, without playing identical music.
And as for the 8-bit Mega Man tunes McCreary fell in love with before his mega-career in film music kicked off? He does chiptunes too (though we knew that from the Eureka soundtrack): the album closes out with an authentic, NES-style rendition of the Dark Void theme. McCreary did this track on his own time as an in-joke for the folks at Capcom, and they wound up inventing an entire extra game around it (the equally 8-bit-flavored DSware title Dark Void Zero, 
which will have its own full soundtrack release as well). Talk about a composer influencing the project he’s working on!
Whether or not you’ve played the game, Dark Void is an outstanding treat for McCreary fans who may be mourning the end of “the Galactica sound.” The Dark Void score is like an unexpected encore at the end of a great concert.
- Theme From Dark Void (2:56)
- Prologue and Main Title (2:10)
- Village Attack (1:47)
- A Mysterious Jungle (4:20)
- Altar Sacrifice (1:09)
- Archon (3:19)
- Ava and the Rocket (2:01)
- Tesla’s Laboratory (1:21)
- The Prophesized One (2:58)
- Taking Flight (2:21)
- Crash Site (3:09)
- Void Requiem (7:49)
- Ava and Tesla Return (0:47)
- Above The Canopy (5:01)
- Hieroglyphs and Betrayal (3:03)
- Defending The Ark (5:45)
- The Collector (3:18)
- Survivor Camp Combat (6:17)
- The Watcher Airship (2:52)
- Watcher Prison (3:19)
- The Imperator (1:22)
- Will and Ava (1:52)
- The Dweller (3:46)
- Ava’s Sacrifice (3:17)
- Will At The River (0:38)
- Dark Void End Credits (2:02)
- Theme from Dark Void (Mega Version Bonus Track) (1:53)
Released by: Sumthing
Release date: 2010
Total running time: 79:33
