I met with my high-school friend and band buddy Thomas Bartchi in 2004 at a café in Copenhagen. We were discussing this audio job he was applying to in Germany

I met with my high-school friend and band buddy Thomas Bartchi in 2004 at a café in Copenhagen. We were discussing this audio job he was applying to in Germany for a gaming company. He had an upcoming interview with them and we were brainstorming what new ways you could utilize audio engineering to write more interactive soundtracks. The normal way was simply to change soundtrack when you went from normal mode to high action. But we started discussing a more interactive approach I had been playing around with in the CD-ROM lingo days and because Thomas was an excellent composer and understood audio engineering at a very deep level we came up with the idea of constructing a sound track in layers so that there would be some audio layer that were always there, but others would then be added or removed to provide a almost a gradient audio intensity experience. The challenge was obviously to make it feel very different gradually even though you were mostly using many of the same elements and just layering them. He went there and while there were other great candidates they gave him the job because of his way of thinking about music in games and the rest is history. His successor for the next game was none other than Hans Zimmer. He later went on to do music for Hitman. Here is the FarCry soundtrack if you want to be taken back in time: https://soundcloud.com/j-wilhelm-139558882/far-cry-2004-main-theme-by-thomas-baertschi https://soundcloud.com/j-wilhelm-139558882/far-cry-2004-main...