We should all have a fan like this...

You’re an Emmy-nominated composer who has worked on some of the most watched sci-fi projects of the last few years. So what do you do with your time off? You write a score for a web show, of course. At least that’s what Bear McCreary did when he wrote a score for the newest Christmas special from The Angry Video Game Nerd.

For those of you not familiar with AVGN, it is a video blog hosted by James Rolfe. His character, the Nerd himself, reviews video games from the era of Nintendo, Super NES, Atari, and Sega Genesis. The games he reviews are typically the worst that game companies had to offer in terms of playability, game content, and horrible hardware (he had one video where he tried several games with Nintendo’s infamous “Power Glove”). He has addressed such issues as not being able to land aircraft in Top Gun and the pointlessness of running around in Friday The 13th (which, come to think of it, is kind of like the movies).

In his new Christmas Special, How The Nerd Stole Christmas, Rolfe weaves a tale based on the Chuck Jones classic special How The Grinch Stole Christmas, where the Nerd plots to steal new, fun games and gaming systems from the townsfolk below, and in return leave them the shitty games he got stuck with on Christmas mornings past. He derides quite a few “classic” games, picking them apart and criticizing everything from doors you can’t enter to enemies that appear and disappear for no reason. As with the Grinch, the Nerd has a change of heart by the end, and returns the games to the town. It definitely has to be the best Christmas special I’ve seen in a good, long while. The video is told in rhyme, to a series of brilliant drawings by frequent AVGN artist Mike Matei.

Bear McCreary, whose work has recently been heard in The Walking Dead and Human Target, is a self-proclaimed fan of AVGN, and contacted Rolfe about doing some music for him. Luckily, his schedule cleared up and he had a week to work on a score for what was going to be Rolfe’s most ambitious video to date. According to McCreary:“This whole thing sounded like a lot of fun, so I dove in. My first task was to come up with instrumentation that would fit the story. The score to the classic Chuck Jones film was composed for a small jazz orchestra, very typical for the era. So, a small ensemble of saxophones, clarinets and flutes was an obvious choice. However, I wanted the score to do more than simply reflect the movie we were parodying. I wanted the music to also reflect The Nerd’s personality.”

The score is a brilliant mix of musical styles, plus 8-bit game sounds from the games we grew up playing. He also includes other musical references in his score:

“I even tucked several musical quotations into the score itself, including a Christmas classic, ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies’ by Tchaikovsky. I used this quote while The Nerd snuck into the village of Gameville to steal games. However, when he descends down the chimney, James added a well-known sound effect from Super Mario Bros. Taking that reference to its next logical level, I scored the following scene with a quotation of the underground music from Super Mario Bros, combining it with ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies!’”

McCreary's credits include Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Caprica, Human Target, and the composer's work will also be heard on the upcoming television superhero series The Cape. You can read his blog, watch a video interview with him and Rolfe, and get a free download of the score here. You can view the latest Christmas Special from The Angry Video Game Nerd here.

Related:

EXCLUSIVE: Composer Bear McCreary talks Human Target, Blood & Chrome

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS ARTICLE, PLEASE HELP SUPPORT OUR SITE, AT NO COST WITH ONE CLICK ON THE FACEBOOK 'LIKE' BUTTON BELOW: