2015 will mark the 20th anniversary of the Heroes series. Can you tell us how you became involved with Might & Magic?
Rob King: I started working at New World Computing back in Feb. 1994 and was originally hired as “The Sound Guy” which then became the Audio Director. The idea of Heroes was spawned from an earlier title called King's Bounty that Jon Van Caneghem created back in his parent’s garage I believe. It was one of the first projects I worked on ay NWC. When I first saw the concept art I was quickly inspired to want to do a Baroque influenced Classical score. At this point my musical background was mostly writing Pop/Rock/Electronic music and I knew I needed a true classical guy to pull this off. About 6 months prior to getting my job at NWC I went to a party with a friend that just so happened to be at Paul Romero’s house. Paul was already kind of known to throw these great parties with good food, drinks and talented musicians getting together to perform various repertoires of music. I met Paul in his kitchen over a glass of wine an instantly loved the guy as we discussed music and recording. Flash forward to when we started the concept of Heroes 1, I always had Paul in the back of my mind from our first encounter and decided to give him a call. I told him my idea for the game and he was pretty thrilled with the idea and was up for the challenge of doing a score for a video game.
Paul Romero: Rob asked if I could make some tunes in a baroque feel that sounded like Vivaldi, Bach, or Handel.. Since I grew up learning the music of Bach, Scarlatti and Handel I felt like knew how the harmonic and melodic content was structured for that particular time period. And so I told Rob the types of instruments and orchestrations needed for that kind of baroque-era feeling and he put together a full arsenal of sounds for me. Hence, this is how be began our partnership 20 years ago. We had one week to create the score for this first Heroes game”. It was a fun fun time for me because I had never played a computer game and I had never created soundtrack music. I had only classical composed concerti, choral works, piano works, and chamber music for concert work. This was a whole new world for me: creating music to help make a fantasy world in a strategic computer game.
