Stephan Schütze has worn many hats in the music world, beginning with his days studying at both the Victorian College of the Arts and LaTrobe University and spending five years in the Australian Army Band in Melbourne as a horn player. He is now a composer, a sound designer, a location recordist and has produced SFX libraries that are used globally by companies such as Disney, Skywalker Sound, Warner Brothers, EA and Activision. His passion for music led him into the video game composing world. In 2001, Schütze scored the Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis video game and was responsible for producing the first ever video game score recorded by an Australian orchestra. His most recent video game, Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles, was released this month. Chris Miller spoke to Schütze about scoring Yonder and how the video game composing world has changed in Australia in the last 15 years.

Your Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis score was the first full orchestra game score recorded in Australia. How did that come about?

JPOG was one of those “perfect storm” kind of events. I had been working at BlueTongue Entertainment (Later became BlueTongue Software, then THQ Australia) for only 12 months. Jurassic...