Photo Credit: Jack Wall conducting for the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 soundtrack
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has a ‘90s-infused soundtrack to make any child of the era nostalgic — and it’s all thanks to composer Jack Wall.
Even if you’re not a gamer, you’ve probably heard about Call of Duty: Black Ops. A series of military shooters that pride themselves on their realism, the original Call of Duty games focused on historical combat in WWII. Then the Modern Warfare spinoff series took things in another direction. Following the success of Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell games, the Black Ops series took things to a wild dystopian future of secret agents and special elite forces.
In 2010, the first Call of Duty: Black Ops was actually set in the middle of the Cold War, but by the third entry in the franchise, the story had jumped forward to a dystopian future full of twisted tech and even more twisted bad guys. The newest entry, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, takes players back to the early 1990s during the first Gulf War.
And what better way to return to the ‘90s than with a high-octane ‘90s-themed soundtrack? Composer Jack Wall knows how to deliver on that front, and he certainly knows how to score a Black Ops game — he’s scored every entry since 2012’s Black Ops 2.
While most of his soundtracks feature a lot of orchestration, for Black Ops 6, he wanted to sort of “bridge the gap” between cinematic orchestration and what was actually going on in the early ‘90s. And the early ‘90s was all about synth coming out of the late ‘80s mixed with the new sound of early grunge.
To capture that sound, Wall turned to alt-rock duo ROMES, who he calls “a modern-day Nirvana.” The pair co-wrote many of the songs on Black Ops 6’s soundtrack, including the game’s multiplayer theme, “Raining the Fire.”
As with his prior scores for the Black Ops series, Wall has created around 160 minutes of original music for tor the Black Ops 6 soundtrack. Only twenty of those are used for the game’s multiplayer mode, while the rest make the single-player campaign feel like a cinematic experience. In each game, the score is built around two songs: the main theme, and the multiplayer track.
Wall has become a prolific media composer, but he started his career in music before focusing specifically on film, television, and eventually video games. Prior to his composing career, Wall engineered at Synchro Sound Studios in Boston — then owned by The Cars — and Skyline Studios NYC, home of renowned producer NIle Rodgers. There he engineered and produced records for John Cale, David Byrne, Dr. John, and Patti Smith.