Award winning composer Garry Schyman has been revealed as the man behind the original score to the upcoming Xbox 360 and PC title BioShock. Schyman’s earlier work is well known to anyone who watched TV in the 80s as his most famous early work included the scores of cult classics Magnum PI and The A-Team.

This isn’t the first time he’s worked on a video game score either. He actually won Best Original Game Score for his work on Voyeur, a controversial title released in 1994 and one of the better games of the now defunct interactive movie genre. More recently, Schyman has scored Destroy All Humans and Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers.

Having a really good score can really put the edge on a game – imagine Halo without its famous symphonies or the Zelda series without its classic, unchanging melodies. However, there’s a lot of modern games (mostly sports titles admittedly) simply relying on licensing singles from big name bands as a quick fix to the musical problem.

I think Forza 2 is good example of how that can be a bit of a half-hearted solution and I ended up turning to my own MP3 collection very quickly. For a narrative driven FPS like BioShock, having the music set the mood is really important to keep the pace going. I’m guessing the war-torn underwater Utopia setting doesn’t really lend itself to any particularly catch tunes though. Expect violin, cello and piano solos aplenty.

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