For Penngrove musician, video games are work

When Jared Emerson-Johnson graduated in 1999 from St. Vincent de Paul High School in Petaluma, composing video game music wasn’t on his radar.

Today, he makes his living by creating the original scores for blockbuster games such as “Game of Thrones,” “Tales from the Borderlands,” “The Walking Dead ” “and Jurassic Park.”

Emerson-Johnson, 33, now lives in Penngrove and works as supervisor of San Rafael-based game audio facility Bay Area Sound. His job involves composing, mixing, editing and playing instruments that range from piano to bass guitar.

“There are days when I spend mornings doing ‘Game of Thrones,’ which has an orchestral, big, bombastic style,” he said. “Then I’ll switch to sci-fi Western music for ‘Tales from the Borderlands,’ electronic instruments, acoustic slide guitar and harmonica.” He plays so many instruments that on the Borderlands score, he recorded all the tracks himself.

Emerson-Johnson does most of his work in his home studio, looking out at pasture, hills and farmland.

“It’s a nice, quiet, meditative place to be 10 to 12 hours, where I can really focus and not have sirens going by every 20 minutes,” he said.

The road from his childhood home, on the far west side of Petaluma near Helen Putnam Regional Park, to his current career involved an early start in music, some formal training and some lucky breaks.

Emerson-Johnson started playing violin at 5 as a student of Suzuki Method teacher Yoko Abe Acheson. Later he learned to sing with voice instructor Eileen Morris. As a teenager, he formed a “teaching team” with Morris to help develop Cinnabar Theater’s Young Rep.

“I grew up in their youth department, doing their kid’s shows, loving them,” he said. “Cinnabar Theater is a really professional theater in a small town. It’s great to have this really, cool artistic musical outlet right in my hometown.”

He also sang in St. Vincent de Paul High School’s choir and played violin in the Santa Rosa Symphony and Marin Symphony Youth Orchestras.

At Cornell University, Emerson-Johnson majored in music, and before his senior year knew that he wanted to continue doing music for a living.

“I knew a handful of people who wrote music for video games and wrote them, asking if they needed help,” he said. “One did - Clint Bajakian. He had the company I now work for,” Bay Area Sound.

Clients included LucasArts, which hired the firm in 2002 to compose the score for “Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb,” with a two-month deadline.

“I ended up working in (Bajakian’s) home, scoring music. At the end of that summer, we went to Seattle and recorded it all with the Seattle Symphonia. It was an amazing experience,” Emerson-Johnson said.

The score later won honors that included the Game Audio Network Guild’s Music of the Year and Best Live Performance Recording awards.

And when Bajakian took a job as music supervisor at Sony, leaving the company he had founded, Emerson-Johnson rose quickly to become the company’s main composer. He said he considers himself very lucky.

“Early on, I wasn’t a big player of games, but I’ve gotten to know games really well in the past 12 years,” he said. “It was the kind of thing where everything went right, and there was very good timing.”

Another reason for his success and that of BA Sound is their extensive work with San Rafael-based game developer Telltale Games.

“We do contracts with various game companies, almost everyone in the Bay Area at one time or another,” he said, “but we have a special relationship, going over 10 years, with Telltale Games. They have gotten bigger and bigger and have gotten really big name licenses.”

Telltale needs a lot of music for its games because the company prefers to release games episodically, like TV shows, he said.

“They do more story-based, narrative games than shooter games. They divide a game into four or five chunks rather than one 10-hour chunk. I’ve scored pretty much every game they’ve made in 10 years, with one or two exceptions. We are still separate companies, but I go in there at least once a week.”

Emerson-Johnson said he likes working in the video game industry because his music tells a story and because music composed for games is interactive. “They’re not just linear things,” he said. “You don’t know when the big scene is going to happen. There’s a certain amount of unpredictability written into it.”

The downside of working in the video game industry? “It’s a really difficult, competitive industry. Ten to 12 hour days are the norm.”

He advises young composers to “play a lot of games, ones that aren’t necessarily the ones you know and like. Get to know the industry as a whole.” And don’t worry about learning everything at once.

“I didn’t write a lot of music before college,” he said. “I was just kind of a performer. It was in college that I got to know writing and composition. I looked for places where I could be a composer and make a living at it.”

In 2004, Emerson-Johnson was named Rookie of the Year by the Game Audio Network Guild, but his most prestigious accolade came in 2013, when his score for “The Walking Dead” was nominated by the British Academy of Film and Television in the Games: Original Music category.

To offset the solitary nature of writing music, Emerson-Johnson sees as much live music as possible and performs with the North Bay Sinfonietta. “I spend most days in my studio, fussing over little details,” he explained. Staying involved with other musicians grounds him and “keeps new ideas flowing all the time.”