Frank Klepacki

Frank Klepacki (born May 25, 1974) is an American musician, video game music composer and sound director best known for his work on the Command & Conquer series. Having learned to play drums as a child, he joined Westwood Studios as a composer when he was only 17 years old. He scored several games there, including the Lands of Lore series, the Dune games, the The Legend of Kyrandia series, Blade Runner, and the Command & Conquer series. His work in Command & Conquer: Red Alert won two awards.
Klepacki is currently the audio director of Petroglyph games, where he scored Star Wars: Empire at War and its expansion. Frank Klepacki was contacted to score Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, but was too busy with Petroglyph to take the project, and declined to mention the offer.
==Biography==
His first task was scoring Star Wars: Empire at War, Petroglyph's launch title; he also helped select voice actors. A die-hard fan of the Star Wars franchise, Klepacki enjoyed complementing John Williams's style as he worked with sound effects used in the feature films. He worked closely with programmers to ensure perfect aural functionality. Though most the game's score is John Williams's work, Klepacki estimates that he contributed 20% original material. Apart from the main theme, he aimed to minimize his editing in order to retain the classic Star Wars sound. He chiefly composed for new areas of the Star Wars universe only found in Empire at War. He calls his work on the game "the peak of my career," and felt he had spent his entire life grooming his abilities for that soundtrack. As a perk of composing, he visited Skywalker Ranch and Industrial Light & Magic, and took pride in having his name associated with an official Star Wars product.
For the Forces of Corruption expansion pack, he took greater creative liberty with the Star Wars feel by writing an original theme for the new criminal faction. In attempting to compose this piece, he wrote several preliminary hooks that were later integrated into the game's battle themes. He composed six pieces for the expansion total, including the finale theme. In line with the criminal theme of the game, Klepacki borrowed motifs and recreated the mood from scenes involving Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. His score for the expansion pack was accepted upon first submission to LucasArts. As Petrogylph's audio director, he also selected sound effects—a tricky process due to the issue of making the criminal faction's sounds a "little different, without straying too much from the original signature sounds." Klepacki worked with LucasArts to select voice actors, and contributed his own talents to the role of IG-88 and other minor characters. A blooper reel of his voice acting was released on Petroglyph's forums after the one-thousandth member registered.
==Sources==
*Star Wars: Empire at War
*Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
==Notes and references==
==External links==
*Official site
*
*
*
*
*
*The Bitters website
*Frank Klepacki's profile at RAWG.io
Category:Real-world composers