IGN bring us a fascinating conversation with MachineGames Jens Andersson (Design Director) and Pete Ward (Audio Director) from the recent Develop Conference in Brighton where they discuss the challenges of bringing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle from concept to completion, a task that included some surprising challenges.
Pete Ward: So for the music, I don’t actually know how all the legal framework and systems work exactly. From my perspective, I just knew that we needed to get this theme and also Marion’s Theme, and also the music from the Peru section of the level, because that’s original John Williams scoring as well.
And we didn’t want to use the original recordings because then there’s a mechanical copyright issue there as well, and we’d have to license all that too, because mechanical copyright is the scoring or composition copyright. So that’s why we recorded all of our music, again, it was re-orchestrated, we recorded so that we — by we I don’t mean MachineGames, I mean Disney — owned the mechanical copyright for those new recordings.
But we needed to make sure that we were allowed to use the Raiders March theme, which is the famous one everyone knows. And we agreed that we could use that wherever we wanted in the product. So there was an unlimited number of times that we could quote it or reference it. But then for some of the other themes like the Peru content, we agreed to use that once, and we agreed to use Marion’s Theme a handful of times. There were very specific legal rules that we had to follow, and what we could use where and when, and all that stuff had to be approved and agreed by Lucasfilm Games obviously as well.
Jens Andersson: Is this because they have on their end agreements with John Williams?
Pete Ward: I think it’s to do with that. So that had to go through our legal team and they did a really good job with that. It took a little while to get through and we had to assume that we’d be able to use it and then confirm we could during development.
Jens Andersson: And they are super careful about that stuff, which kind of makes sense. Like all the rights, it goes for fonts, it goes for everything. It needs to be by the book.
Be sure to check out the full interview where they delve into every corner of the process of bringing the hit game to fruition.
