INTERVIEW: The Flight Discuss The Music Of ‘Assassin's Creed Shadows,’ Its Influences, ‘Alien: Isolation,’ ‘Zubo’ And More

Ubisoft released Assassin's Creed Shadows just back in March, and it quickly got crowned one of the best Assassin's Creed games since Black Flag by a lot of critics, and the majority of audiences also agreed with the statement. The game takes its players to feudal Japan, where they play as the assassin Naoe and the samurai Yauske. With the introduction of Yauske, who was an African slave turned samurai who served under Oda Nobunaga, it allowed for some creativity with the game's soundtrack. There wasn't anyone better to orchestrate the score aside from The Flight, a duo who previously worked on Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Christopher: It is a pleasure to speak with you today. I was lucky enough to play Assassin's Creed Shadows early thanks to Ubisoft, and one of the few things that I noticed, and even when my friend got to play, we noticed, we said if Assassin's Creed Shadows has to be nominated for anything this year at the awards season, it has to be that score. It is one of the best scores we've heard in an Assassin's Creed game.

Joe Henson (The Flight): That's really kind, thank you.

Christopher: I've got to ask for myself and the fans; there's a score that plays towards the start of the game where Yauske is trying to make his way to Naoe. He's fighting in the rain, and there's this track playing where it sounds like there's some rap mixed with an African language that I'm not familiar with, but it hasn't yet been released online.

Joe Henson (The Flight): Is that one of the Thunderdrum tracks?

Christopher: I think so.

Joe Henson (The Flight): I don't know. I haven't got that far in the game (laughs), we haven't played that much of it. We don't know what goes in. We know what music goes in but we don't know what order it goes in because of the systemic stuff. Until we play the game, we don't know how it turns out. If its got African vocals on it, it's probably a Thunderdrum track.

© Ubisoft

Christopher: That's good to know. There's also a track called "The Fall of Yauske". What was the influence for creating that score for him?

Joe Henson (The Flight): When we first got the game, even before, when we were first pitched the game, Alexis and I had a lot of discussions about the music for this [Assassin's Creed Shadows]. After doing Odyssey, we wanted it to be very different, and Ubisoft wanted a very different score for it as well. So we came at it from a modern angle rather than trying to do a historical thing. We looked at how Japanese music, film, TV shows, and anime have influenced modern popular Western culture. The first thing before we even saw Yauske was that we were thinking that we wanted to come at it from the Wu-Tang Clan. I toured with hip hop bands when I was young. Me and Alexis, our influences are different, but where we meet is with hip hop.

So the first thing we said is we just went Ghost Dog. We want to watch Ghost Dog. We were looking at how Wu-Tang used samples and stuff from kung fu movies. Then we were looking at how trap is being influenced by Japanese music and stuff. That that was kind of the angle we were coming at with that. Just basically trying to be modern and trying to look at the modern influences that we have.

Christopher: It's all good (laughs). I'm interested in hearing because, to be fair, you are the first composer that I've interviewed. So I'm intrigued by the process and how it works because people don't realise when they're watching a film or show or even playing a game, but music is so important. It's like it's its own character within it. So I love to just hear what you have to say, honestly. I don't mind; if you want to ramble, you can ramble.

Joe Henson (The Flight): (Laughs) Alexis and I now, we've worked together for so long that a lot of it is like psychic between us. We've got so many influences on our separate paths that when we come together, there's loads of stuff we talk about and sit down and watch. First, we watched this Ghost Dog. We've watched Seven Samurai films and films like that. Obviously, looking at how those films influenced westerns. We were watching some Ennio Morricone, listening to Ennio Morricone scores and watching Spaghetti Westerns. There are so many things that were influenced by Japanese movies. I love anime and stuff like that as well, so we watch a bunch of that.

Christopher: What's your favorite anime, if you don't mind me asking?

Joe Henson (The Flight): Do you know what? My favorite being really honest, it's really boring, but it's probably Akira.

Christopher: That's fine; I feel like my ones are boring as well. Mine's One Piece.

Joe Henson (The Flight): One Piece. Yeah. Of course. But it depends – I'm very old, so I saw Akira in the cinema. That's when I was a kid, and it blew my mind. So, yes, it is age dependent. I'm showing my age now.

(Laughs) That's all good. Honestly. I can't imagine watching that in the cinema. Obviously, they do re-releases, but there's nothing compared to that first time when a film releases.

Joe Henson (The Flight): The original Ghost in the Shell as well; that was amazing. The score on that is brilliant. That was really influential on the stuff we're doing on this. Really cool stuff.

Christopher: You were saying earlier about how you're playing the game, and you're not that far in. When you're working, it's all out of order, and you don't really know where things are going to be. At what point does Ubisoft bring you in, or not even just Ubisoft, but just any video game company? When do they bring you in to work on the score for a video game?

Joe Henson (The Flight): Games are much longer than working on films or TV. A game takes about five years to develop. Ubisoft is slightly different; we come in quite late, so we have a year to eighteen months. We come in right at the end, but it's still longer than, you know, on a film where it can take three months. So it's still a nice long process, but we come on there. They're in a good place, but some things will be grey boxes, and some things will be animatics. They send us captures of them playing the game, and there's a lot of the gameplay that is usually in place, but the story changes. That's all in flux.

Also, because we don't have a way of playing it when we work with Ubisoft, we're not sure of the flow of the game, and even that changes as well. You never really know until it ships and you get it into your hands. We're writing layered interactive music as well. So that we give to them, and we don't know how the system's going to play that back a lot of the time. We give them a toolkit of audio, and they will edit and put different tracks together. We never really know until it's finished how the music's going to come back.

Christopher: How much freedom are you given in terms of creating the score? Is there anything that Ubisoft tells you to do, or is it complete freedom?

Joe Henson (The Flight): No. There are always boundaries, and there's always an angle that the developer has, and then we set our own boundaries. But because of technology, you could do anything. So we like to sit down and define the rules. Obviously, it's an Assassin's Creed game, and there's a lot of invested parties in it. So it's very important. There are a lot of people we're working with, and everyone has their own idea of what the score should be, but we've worked very closely with the team in Quebec. And, Jerome, we would meet every few days online and talk to him about music and send him music, and it's an always-evolving process.

Once you've done the pitch, we kind of know if we get the game, what angle we're coming in at, and when we've written a couple of pieces of music for them, we do revisions on that. And then when we eventually get the job, we're kind of in a good place anyway because we've already sent them stuff that we've been working on.

Christopher: You've been working with Ubisoft since, I believe, Black Flag.

Joe Henson (The Flight): Black Flag multiplayer. Yeah.

Christopher: How has that relationship evolved since then? Because, you know, you've done, I believe, Odyssey and-

Joe Henson (The Flight): That poster there (points behind him) is from Zubo, which came out on the Nintendo DS. That was our first ever game; the person we met, Lydia Andrews, we got on really well with. We did that game and a few other games at EA, and then she left EA and went to Ubisoft Annecy. We worked on a game with her that never shipped, and I think she used some of it in a demo she was doing with the Black Flag multiplayer. And the game director said, "What is that music? Oh, that's really cool." She rang us up, which we pitched for the multiplayer. And then, interestingly as well, the other person we worked with on Zubo left EA and went to Creative Assembly, and we did Alien: Isolation with him.

That was a really important game. Have you played it?

Christopher: I've not played Zubo before.

Joe Henson (The Flight): It's brilliant. It's brilliant. It was supposed to be for next gen when next gen was the Nintendo Wii and -

Christopher: Xbox, maybe?

Joe Henson (The Flight): Maybe. I don't know. But it was supposed to be, and then it got smaller and smaller and smaller and ended up just coming out of the DS. It had a really big music budget. They wanted the music to sound like it was licensed, and I met Lydia through working with a band, and because Alexis and I came from bands, she came to us because she thought we would do music that sounds like the kind they wanted, like Beastie Boys and Chemical Brothers and stuff.

Christopher: That's nice that you have that on your wall then. It's a very important piece.

Joe Henson (The Flight): It is really, really important to us.

Christopher: I was also going to ask; Ezio's theme has become the iconic series motif for Assassin's Creed and it's included in the shadows as well. I wanted to ask you what the importance of including that within the score for shadows is and whether it's -

Joe Henson (The Flight): It's a classic, isn't it?

Christopher: It's a classic!

Joe Henson (The Flight): Anytime it happens in the game, it lifts the game. And TEKE::TEKE did an amazing version of it. We really enjoyed doing it on Odyssey, but when we got to Shadows, we didn't really want to do a new version of it because it would just sound the same as Odyssey. So we're really pleased that TEKE:: TEKE did a really cool rendition. It took guts to do what they did; it was so different. We did a little quote from it early on in the game; I don't want to do any spoilers early on in the game.

© Ubisoft

Christopher: With Naoe's theme. there's an important instrument that is vital to her story, the Tsuchibue.

Joe Henson (The Flight): We went to the meeting, Jonathan Dumont put one on the table and said, that's her instrument and it's a very easy instrument to play, but it's really hard to master. It's quite difficult thing to record as well, but we wanted to do a really simple motif that the family could play to each other. We found a player who could play it brilliantly, but we wanted it to be like a naive, really simple motif that you could hear and instantly know it. And I think it works. It's nice. We've obviously done full arrangements of it, and it becomes more and more, what's the word? Not advanced. But, yes, it grows in the in the story, but it starts off very simple. It's like a three-four note motif, basically.

Christopher: Would you say either you or Alexis mastered it? Which one have you practiced with it?

Joe Henson (The Flight): I played it. I don't have the lung capacity, and we got through three microphones. It was really difficult to record but we we we use similar instruments in Odyssey, and there are clay pot pipes in most countries, actually. It's one of the first things that people make but this one is really difficult to play. So we got Christine Nigus, she's the master. We work with some people here, and then eventually, Christine, who's out in America, she's got lots of them. She's the one, she's the player.

Christopher: It's like a Karate Kid type of situatuion.

Joe Henson (The Flight): Exactly. Very much so. I never became the master.

Christopher: You mentioned Alien: Isolation. Assassin's Creed is just a big video game franchise and Alien is a game based off a film series. How is it basically making music for a game based off a film, if that makes sense?

Joe Henson (The Flight): Alien is possibly one of the top three films for me. Sometimes it's my favorite. You know how your top three always alternate. Alexisʼ too. The biggest part of it was that there is weight on your shoulders because that is a precious thing, but it was amazing. We sat down with them; we worked out what we thought Alien was and what makes the sound of Alien. They licensed some of the original music, Jerry Goldsmith. So we were able to use the original themes, which is like, it's horrible when you get something like that, and then you're not allowed to use the themes... Just that pastiche, really. There are other games and films even where it grates with you. There was a Star Wars film; I remember thinking, “Oh, they've really tried to work on that theme, and they could have just licensed the original.”

© Sega

That was a big moment getting that. Alexis always makes fun of me because every game, I go, “This is a big one. This is a big one.” Shadows was the big one and there's the next thing we're doing which is the big one.

Christopher: Is there anything you can say about the next thing you're doing?

Joe Henson (The Flight): No, nothing at all.

Christopher: But it's something that we can all be excited for?

Joe Henson (The Flight): I'm excited. I'm very excited about it. I think Odyssey was the biggest thing I've ever worked on and then Shadows. Someone completely misquoted me in the press saying, "This is the game you've all been waiting for". Everyone wanted feudal Japan.

Christopher: Since Assassin's Creed 2, people were saying, we need to go to Japan and finally, Ubisoft have brought us here. Quite frankly, it is one of the best Assassin's Creed games to release in a long while.

Joe Henson (The Flight): I've really enjoyed it. It's really cool. Both characters are really satisfying to play with their different fight styles, and I'm a sucker for stealth so I love that and playing Naoe.

Christopher: I think I got addicted to playing a lot of Yasuke because I can just run into a stronghold and take everyone down. I could just run through the doors and no one can really stop me, but obviously, that's the thing I love about the game. There's right times where you can play as Yasuke and when you should play as Naoe. I thought that was great.

Final question, Is there anything that you would love to work on in the future that you haven't really done yet? It could be original, a genre or a franchise.

Joe Henson (The Flight): I don't know, I really enjoy working in games. I think people put film on a pedestal. My dad never really understood and my mum just didn't know what computer games are. She goes "You work in computer... games" and she could never quite work it out. But I love working in games, I love the people. This sounds tacky but I love the fans, they're so invested in it. We're going to the Assassin's Creed concerts, and they're they're incredible and all the fans are brilliant. I love this world, so I just wanna keep working on on games. What we're doing next is really exciting, and then looking at our road map, there's some really exciting things coming up. So just wanna keep at it.

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This interview has been edited for clarity.