Interview with Composer Sam Hulick (Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad)

Composer Sam Hulick shares about his technological path to the world of video game music composition - from MASS EFFECT to RED ORCHESTRA 2 - HEROES OF STALINGRAD.

Interview conducted by Marius Masalar

MM - You grew up in something of an interesting environment. A custom-designed geodesic dome? Tell us a bit about how your younger years prepared you for your current path.

SAM HULICK - Yeah, my dad played in a lot of bands throughout his life and even produced an album, but he earned his living as a contractor doing construction. He designed and built the house where I spent about twelve years of my life. For a while, we had a normal living room, but eventually it was converted into a music studio complete with a mixing board, microphones, keyboards, guitars, the works (much to the disappointment of my mother who didn't get much peace and quiet). Definitely a music-centric household to say the least.

I started off in my early teens with a strong interest in computers, in a broad sense. I was really into video games, of course, on both console systems and computers, but I was interested in programming and learning how software works. I have fond memories from college of spending a lot of time in the computer labs, one of which was full of NeXT computers which ran an operating system that was essentially a very early version of Mac OS X. I guess it's kind of funny how things have come full circle and now I work pretty much exclusively on Mac OS X. I'm also a pretty big Linux geek, but that's another story.

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