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Jeremy Soule ( ) is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television, and video games. He has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career, including The Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars, Total Annihilation, and the Harry Potter series.
He became an employee of Square in 1994 after several years of private composition studies. After finishing the soundtrack to Secret of Evermore in 1995, he left to join Humongous Entertainment, where he composed for several children's games as well as Total Annihilation, his first award-winning score. In 2000, he left to form his own music production company, Soule Media, later called Artistry Entertainment. In 2005, he founded DirectSong, a record label that published digital versions of his soundtracks as well as those of classical composers. DirectSong remained active until 2019.
Soule's works have been played in several live concerts such as the Symphonic Game Music Concert in Germany and the international Play! A Video Game Symphony concert series. While many of his works are orchestral, he considers himself someone who creates more than just one type of music. Several of Soule's soundtracks were created with the help of his brother, Julian Soule.
While playing video games as a child, Soule came to believe that the experience they created could be greatly enhanced by having a better musical score. After completing high school, he took a year to create a portfolio showcasing what he felt video game scores should sound like. Soule sent the tape to LucasArts and Square. Square very much appreciated the portfolio; he does not believe that LucasArts ever listened to his tapes as they had a "no unsolicited package" policy. Soule began working at Square in Seattle only two weeks after first submitting his demo tapes.
While working at Humongous, Soule met fellow employee and video game designer Chris Taylor, and signed on to compose the soundtrack to his major project, Total Annihilation. Soule convinced Taylor that, given the large number of other real-time strategy games coming out at the same time as Total Annihilation with techno scores, that to separate themselves they needed to do a large orchestral score. He wagered a year's worth of pay that doing so would be successful; Gilbert felt that it was after the first sentence of the first review of the game he read was about the music. Given the software limitations at the time, to make the sound work correctly required a full live orchestra, the first that Soule had ever worked with; the orchestral tracks in Evermore had been performed by Soule and his brother, two instruments at a time. The soundtrack earned Soule his first award, that of "Best Music" of 1997 from GameSpot. Soule spent the next two years composing music for the game's two expansion packs and for children's games.
In 2001, Soule scored the first of five Harry Potter games that he would work on between then and 2005. His first game, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, was nominated for an Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, while Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban won and were nominated, respectively, for a British Academy of Film & Television Arts award for Best Score in the Game Music Category. The other games he composed for that year include and , which he later described as a bad game lifted up in the eyes of testers and reviewers by good music. He was responsible for composing the soundtracks to three top-selling role-playing games in 2002, those of Dungeon Siege, , and Neverwinter Nights; Morrowind earned him his second Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences award nomination.
Soule was in a major car accident in the mid 2000s, during which he had a momentary realisation that life is precious. In interview, he described a vision of "Native American warriors" that he saw during the crash. The highway patrolman who arrived at the scene also invited him to meet a chief of the nearby Lummi Nation reservation who composed music. Soule stated that the experience provided inspiration during his subsequent compositions.
Artistry Entertainment scored a string of highly successful games through the remainder of the decade, including the Guild Wars series, , , and . Oblivion was an award-winning soundtrack by Soule. It was nominated for the 2006 British Academy of Film & Television Arts and Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences awards, and won the MTV Video Music Awards and Official Xbox Magazine soundtrack awards. Soule also worked on another of Chris Taylor's real-time strategy titles in 2007, with the launch of Supreme Commander.
In 2005, Jeremy and Julian Soule founded DirectSong, a company which sold downloads of compositions as well as works by dozens of classical composers. By 2007 the company had grown to over one million registered customers, though Soule noted that not all of those customers resulted in a sale of a non-free product. Soule says that the traffic numbers for DirectSong had surpassed some major record labels at times. Soule also used DirectSong to sell "expansion packs" of music for games such as Guild Wars that could be played in game like the rest of the soundtrack. He estimates that at least 10% of the players of Guild Wars bought his musical expansion for the game, Battle Pak 1. DirectSong struggled to fulfill orders or provide timely support, resulting in an "F" rating by the Better Business Bureau.
In March 2013, Soule launched a Kickstarter project to fund a classical music album called The Northerner: Soule Symphony No. 1, seeking $10,000 for the album. The campaign ultimately raised a total of $121,227. The project features vocals in Old Norse, with Soule citing the successful use of the similar Icelandic language by Malukah in one of her own projects during development. For the project, Soule indicated that his company were developing new audio technology. Soule began accepting refunds for the unreleased symphony in 2016. An album of sketches was ultimately released in 2017, though not the full symphony. As of 2025, the project has not been released.
In 2014, Soule also signed an MMO exclusivity deal with Sony Online Entertainment, to compose music for EverQuest Next and Landmark. EverQuest Next was canceled in March 2016; Landmark was released but shut down in February 2017, less than a year after launch. In 2015, Soule composed a Dota 2 music pack, along with his brother Julian. The soundtrack was available as part of the Compendium, a pack of digitally-distributed content that funded the prize pool for The International 2015 tournament, which took place in August 2015 and ultimately featured the largest prize-pool in e-sports history at the time, with over $18,000,000 in total. In the following few years he primarily worked on indie titles.
In 2014, Julian and Jeremy Soule co-founded an audio company named Virtual Sonics. The company entered into a joint venture with Roland Corporation in 2016, with Soule appointed co-director. Virtual Sonics produced digital instrumentation for Roland Cloud, which launched in 2018. Legendary Pictures co-founder Scott Mednick was an early investor in Virtual Sonics, but withdrew in August 2019 via a stock buyout. A dispute over the terms of the purchase ultimately led to a lawsuit between Mednick and Soule in 2022, which was resolved in favor of Soule.
Selections of remixes of Soule's work appear on English remixing websites such as OverClocked ReMix. Soule is a supporter of the game music arrangement community, even going so far as to submit his own arrangement to OverClocked ReMix. He did so to help promote and inspire younger and newer composers. The track, "Squaresoft Variation", arranges the Final Fantasy VI piece "Terra"; Soule has said that he chose the piece to remix because when he first started at Square he spent some time debugging the game before his composition duties for Evermore started.
Although many of his works are orchestral in nature, Soule has denied that it is his "style", as he feels that the term boxes him into only creating one type of music. He prefers to call himself a "music practitioner", or someone who creates music in general rather than just one type of music as he is capable of many styles, such as J-pop, which he has written along with Jeff Miyahara. Soule considers music to be like a language, which can be arranged in many different ways if you understand the structure. He does not have a favorite genre of game to compose for, preferring instead to compose for "ambitious" games by people with "new ideas".
Soule's greatest musical influences are "Claude Debussy's exploration of harmony", "Richard Wagner's grand operas", and "Mozart's form and composition". While many of his orchestral works are based on Film score in terms of scope, he does not often listen to movie scores, though he names his favorite composer as John Williams. The influence has been noted by critics, who have termed Soule "the John Williams of video game music". Among video game music influences, he has cited Square for providing him "with the education for what quality means to this business" and Nobuo Uematsu in particular. His favorite style of music to listen to is Britpop and rock music, while his favorite video games are the ones that he has written scores to, especially the ones made by Chris Taylor, though one of his all-time favorites is The Legend of Zelda. He has said that the games he would most like to work on that he has not already are ones by Shigeru Miyamoto, a Final Fantasy game, and a Metroid game.
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