United States · Born 1974 · Composer
A professional drummer from age 11, Frank Klepacki joined Westwood Studios at 17 and scored its strategy games — his aggressive "Hell March" for Command & Conquer: Red Alert beat Trent Reznor's Quake music for PC Gamer's best-soundtrack award.
Frank Klepacki had been a professional drummer since the age of 11, and he brought that rhythmic, percussion-forward sensibility to Westwood Studios when he joined as a composer in 1991, at the age of 17, just before his senior year of high school. Over the following decade he became the defining musical voice of one of the most important strategy-game studios in the world, scoring the Lands of Lore and Legend of Kyrandia series, Westwood's Dune games, and the noir adventure Blade Runner (1997) — but above all the Command & Conquer series. In 1992 he handled the audio for Dune II, the game widely credited with codifying the real-time strategy template, complementing the earlier Dune soundtrack. When he scored the first Command & Conquer in 1994, he built a style that fused orchestral, house, heavy metal, and hip-hop influences into something no strategy game had sounded like before — music with the aggression and drive of a rock record rather than the ambient wallpaper typical of the genre. The approach reached its most famous expression in "Hell March," the main theme of Command & Conquer: Red Alert: a stomping, martial anthem built on a drum-machine pulse and a shouted cadence. "Hell March" won the 1996 PC Gamer award for Best Game Soundtrack, beating — memorably — the Quake soundtrack composed by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor. Klepacki went on to write two direct successors, "Hell March 2" and "Hell March 3," as the main themes of Red Alert 2 and Red Alert 3, making the piece one of the few pieces of game music to define a franchise across three separate installments. After the consolidation of Westwood Studios in the mid-2000s, Klepacki became audio director at Petroglyph, the studio founded by former Westwood staff, where he scored Star Wars: Empire at War. He has continued to work as a composer and audio director while remaining an active drummer, and in 2019 launched "Frank Klepacki & The Tiberian Sons," a live band performing his Command & Conquer catalogue — a rare case of a game composer's work sustaining a touring concert act of its own.