On Thursday evening, July 27th, 7-10PM, at The Seattle Film Institute Theater, CN! project Seattle Composers Alliance (SCA) presents a meet and greet, lecture, and Q&A with the award winning composer of Destiny and Halo and founder of Highwire Games, Marty O'Donnell.
Marty O'Donnell earned his Masters of Music Degree in Composition with honors from USC in 1981. He then founded the Chicago-based commercial music and sound production company, TotalAudio, which in 1997 produced sound design for Cyan’s Riven, the Sequel to Myst, and created all of the audio for Bungie’s award winning Myth series. His body of work also includes numerous original scores for television, radio, and film.
In the spring of 2000, ten days after Marty accepted a position as Bungie’s Audio Director and Composer, Microsoft purchased the studio and moved them to Redmond so they could focus their efforts on developing Halo for the Xbox platform launch. The highly acclaimed Halo series went on to be extremely successful, with Halo 3 shattering entertainment records for both single day and first week sales, and with the total number of Halo games played now tallied in the billions.
The audio and music for the Halo series has received numerous honors and awards, including the Game Developers Choice Award, the Edge Award, Rolling Stone Magazine’s Best Game Soundtrack, and Best Sound/Music from the AIAS, IGDA, GANG, TEC, and Spike TV. The critically acclaimed soundtracks are also best sellers.
In July of 2007, Marty became one of the partners in the once again independent Bungie. His final project with them, Destiny, featured music in collaboration with Sir Paul McCartney. In addition to creating and overseeing sound design, music, and implementation, Marty also did the casting and directing of all the voice acting for Bungie’s games. The music and audio from Destiny have won several awards including Best Audio and Best Music from the AIAS. He was awarded GANG’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016.
Marty is co-founder and co-owner of Highwire Games in Seattle. Their first title, Golem, is an exclusive title for Playstation VR and will be released later this year. He is also composed and produced Echoes of the First Dreamer, the musical prequel to Golem, which is available now.
(Source: Marty O'Donnell Music LLC, Marty O'Donnell Wikipedia)