Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20As a kid, Andrew Young put his parents’ dictionary set to good use. While a makeshift drum kit wasn’t the most conventional use for them, it was how Andrew discovered his passion for music. In doing so, he gave a slightly different meaning to the phrase “play on words.” Over time, Andrew has found a unique way to combine his love of music with his interest in video games. The Ontario native started composing music in his later teen years and has since written hundreds of songs in pursuit of his dream of composing music for video games. “The idea came from mostly just playing a lot—playing the games. I’m kind of a nerdy guy anyway, playing the original Marios and Zeldas and stuff like that. You could probably recognize the Mario music if you heard it. That kind of thing shows that video game music actually has something to it,” Andrew said. Andrew recounts the first time he heard video game magazines and TV shows refer to the music and talk specifically about the composer. “I’d never really thought about it before while playing the game and enjoying the music. It became real like, ‘an actual person wrote this music. An actual team of people made this piece of interactive art’—like a piece of media and I could be a part of something like that and enjoy it,” he said. Being a part of something bigger than an individual assignment appeals to Andrew and the team aspect of creating video game music is a huge draw for him. “I think being a part of a team of people is a lot more attractive to me than just being that solo artist in a bedroom trying to make it,” he explained. “Especially in an orchestral-symphonic area, you need more people. There’s not really too many bedroom composers that are doing symphonies and suites and stuff like that.” “It’s a really cool challenge and basically it’s the new venue for classical music because classical music has fallen out of popular music,” Andrew continued. “The cinematic music is mostly becoming formulaic, blockbuster cinematic music. So the place you can go to kind of experiment is the smaller indie video games. They’re slowly getting more recognition as “real music.” There’s a video game called Journey that came out in 2012 or 2013, and it’s the first video game soundtrack to be nominated for a Grammy.” While Andrew initially started composing for fun, he’s now being contracted to write music for gaming podcasts along with other advertising material, including some for Briercrest. Andrew shared how he first began composing for other people. “There’s an online podcast [about