The year was 2023, my first at Riot Games, and we were coming up on the Year of the Dragon, the most important on the Chinese Lunar Calendar. The marketing department was thinking about phasing out Lunar Revel themes, which were usually accompanied by concept art slideshow videos and did not drive the thousands or millions of views that fully animated trailers did, but they knew we needed to do something special for the final one.

I created a piece of music separated into 3 parts to unite the three Lunar New Year thematics we were working on - LoL’s Heavenscale, Porcelain, and TFT’s Golden Dragon Skyscraper. This would be performed by Singapore’s TENG Ensemble (Chinese ensemble that blends traditional with modern) together with a top Hollywood orchestra, and featuring my own playing as the erhu soloist.

We went through quite a few iterations before settling on this, and it was my first taste of working in a big company where even a “successful” pitch can be upended at any time as creative directions change. It also made me realize how a small change (in this instance, sampling Jean-Gabriel Raynaud’s “Porcelain” percussion) could change the whole perception of a piece. The resulting composition is beautiful, lively, at times chaotic, but overall harmonious, just like Lunar New Year:

During my 3 years at Riot Games, I supervised and managed the Riot Singapore music department, but chose the particularly difficult or creatively open projects to work on personally. The “Le Bunny Bon Bon Bistro” arena was one such project. the creative brief specified “cafe” music for level 1 and “idol” music for level 7, but we were all wondering “would our majority-male player base buy a pink arena filled with cute bunnies?”

I did a deep-dive on what our players were listening to in their free time, listened to what they chose as background music for their gameplay highlight reels, and experimented with my own style and expression as a jazz player to come up with this. It starts out as a light jazz song (with bunny vocals sung by myself, pitched up) and then when Level 7 hits, it becomes a melding of classic J-Idol-Pop and Kawaii Future Bass, with a sprinkling of jazz lines in the bass to keep it tasty.

While looking for inspiration in the Future Bass style, I ran across something unexpected - the chords to the song “Girl Front” by Loona were a sample, from a commercially available sample pack, and fit perfectly into the song. Balancing the risk of being accused of “copying” the song, with the reward of fans (and Stans) feeling a connection to one of their favorite artists, I chose to take the risk. I slipped the sample in at 4:41, but in my constant pursuit of “being a part of the conversation,” I expanded it into a new, catchy beat, and players noticed.

This is one of those rare times when everyone’s creative risk-taking paid off - it became the best-selling TFT arena of all time, and the most requested arena by players to be added back into the shop after its sales run finished. The impeccable design, personality of the bunnies, and yes, the infectious music, all played a part in its overwhelming success:

Hold my scissors! When the Teamfight Tactics team asked us to make a “blockbuster moment” as popular with players as our hyper-successful Le Bunny Bon Bon Bistro, we went all-in on Gwen - the character, the cuteness, the slight weirdness, and of course, the music!

We again thought deeply about what players were looking for - an arena that feels like a “house” for their chibi tactician (Chibi Gwen) - complete with music that she would be playing, a fitting theme for her hyper, cute character. We didn’t want it to feel like a copy of Le Bunny, but we wanted it to have a similar soul, so the team asked me to write the music again.

I morphed the existing Gwen theme from League of Legends by Kole Hicks (heard at the beginning of the track) fully from orchestral into modern. I recorded the music using a live Hollywood Scoring string orchestra, which I personally conducted in LA , and the Gwen VO peppered in to give it life is from the original voice actor for Chibi Gwen.

In 2019, the hottest thing in China was “Ne Zha” - an animated film about a mischievous demigod which dominated the Chinese box office and broke through to international success. China’s most popular game, Honor of Kings, decided to capitalize on this success by hiring the Ne Zha’s director Jiaozi to create a cinematic launch trailer of unprecedented length and quality for their new hero “Lan - The Shark Blade.”

Although Honor of Kings had worked with the biggest names in music (including Hans Zimmer, Howard Shore, and Tan Dun) they wanted someone with a fresh, unique, cinematic style, and conducted a search both domestically and internationally for the composer of this film. I must have written something they liked, since they selected me to write Lan’s theme and score this film in my own signature orchestral style, using their longtime collaborators, the Budapest Scoring Orchestra and Choir to record it:

For Teamfight Tactics, one of my biggest projects was slowly revamping the music system to be more flexible and reliable, while also increasing players’ perceptions of value for “Battlepass Arenas” - of which Bilgewater Bay was the first one I composed.

We were using a system of writing “on top of” the base music for TFT in order to create these arenas, but I found a way to push the value up anyway, using way more of an “original composition” while still using some stems of base music layers to give familiarity. I recorded this featuring 3 excellent players from Hollywood Scoring on fiddle, accordion, and viola da gamba, suplemented with my own guitar and mandolin playing, plus a bunch of improvised perc made from found materials including chains, coins, and a Chalong Bay rum bottle, my favorite brand from Thailand.

For the win/lose stingers where the personality of the music really needed to shine through, I added a raucous pirate choir, and to sound like a bar filled with tough, drunken pirates, I sang all of the parts myself in various states of drunkenness. That rum bottle came in handy for more than just percussion.

I met PixelNeko at Global Game Jam in Beijing, and we became fast friends. We shared a love of JRPGs, and wanted to create something unique and memorable for players - a Gacha game with engaging gameplay and a story that touches your heart, not just your wallet. We made Revived Witch together, and over the course of 3 years, we released update after update to players, each with its own music and memorable characters.

The first day writing the demo for Revived Witch, I wrote a theme for the main character which I would expand into over 1.5 hours of music as the story sprawled into numerous locations and ideas. This project showed me that the same theme could weave as a thread through pieces that make a player feel the warmth of home, the wonder of discovery, or the thrill of battle. Throughout the project, the only performer I consistently recorded besides myself was Nate Laguzza, the most versatile studio drummer I’ve ever met.

Most of the music can be found online, and fans have curated playlists and extended versions to give this music life beyond the game - I’ve even heard talented fans even make covers and transcriptions of the music themselves. Some pieces like “Snegourchka” fell into place easily through improvisation, others like “All the World Against Me” took weeks of experimentation to feel right, but all of them were my gift to players, hoping they could feel some of that creative joy I felt when writing this music:

Mobile Legends contacted me with an interesting request: how do you write music for a character who can simultaneously travel backwards and forwards through time?

I set out to create a “musical palindrome” with elements which were meant to be played by a live orchestra and then reversed later, on top of which I layered more live orchestra, played forwards, and percussion made out of reversed sound design. I even hid a musical morse code message in it at one point with guitar.

This was one of Moonton’s first projects with full live orchestra, for which I used longtime collaborators Four For Music, conducted by George Strezov: