What do Black Ops 6, Mass Effect, and Barbie Secret Agent have in common? The answer may surprise you
There’s a common line through three very, very different games, and his name is Jack Wall.
Have you played Call of Duty Black Ops 6 yet? The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up the game and jump into the single-player portion (if that’s what you’re into), is the theme. There’s one single horn, playing this gorgeous, simple motif, to start things off. Bass and drums build slowly in the background, and the scene is set - it feels solitary, isolated, one single unit awaiting a storm.
That’s all intentional. That music - how it makes you feel, and the visual it summons - was made to make you feel defiant. Like a soldier going into a skirmish where the odds are stacked against you, where you have an impossibly thin chance of success. It’s part of the Call of Duty power fantasy, and composer Jack Wall knows that.
“Black Ops is always about one person, or a small group of people, taking on a big, dark, shadowy underworld organisation,” he tells me in an interview. “That’s kind-of what Black Ops is, every time. So, for the theme for Black Ops 6, I start off with a single horn line, and by the end, everyone else [in the orchestra] is in the pool, playing the same theme. That’s by design; you’re starting off by yourself, and you’re fighting everyone. And the whole world is blowing out [laughter].”
Wall has been with Call of Duty for a long time, now. As well as composing the main theme for the series for every title since Black Ops 2, he’s also leant his ear and his hands to the zombies maps elsewhere in the series (notably Vanguard and MW3 2023). He knows CoD inside out, and if you go to any YouTube video playing his score, you’ll see reams of fans lauding his intimate knowledge of the series. He’s as much a part of Black Ops as the gunplay or the traversal.
But that wasn’t always the case. Before Wall started submitting hundreds of minutes of music per game to Treyarch and Activision, he was a well-known entity for other reasons. He composed and produced the music for Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, for example - the latter featuring what is perhaps my favourite track in any Western RPG in Suicide Mission.
“I will say that one of the reasons I'm working on Call of Duty is because of Mass Effect 2,” he explains, “because everyone who made Black Ops 2… they were looking for a new composer after Black Ops 1. And it just so happens that they were fans of that soundtrack of Mass Effect 2.
“Enter Brian Tuey, who was audio director at Treyarch - and has been for like 15, 16 years at this point. When he heard that Mass Effect 2 soundtrack and he discovered it was me that composed it, he was blown away, because we had worked together 10 years prior to any of that at this tiny little game company called Gigawatt, making little games for kids on behalf of Mattel and Disney.”
Wall tells me that he and Tuey - these two men that have become synonymous with Call of Duty and bastions the most ‘ooh-rah’ FPS shooter in the world - had actually met working on Secret Agent Barbie.
“So we worked on that game together, then we worked on Black Ops 2 together [laughter]. My daughter - who was four, at the time - was a huge, huge fan of Barbie Secret Agent fan, and we played that game together all the time. And then 10 years later, I’m working on Black Ops 2 with the same guy [laughter]. My career has been a network of ladder-climbing; I’ve ended up workign on everything from Barbie Secret Agent to Myst, Mass Effect to Black Ops. It’s been quite a ride.”
But what’s next? Wall tells me, slyly, he’s working on something “more fantasy” at the moment, so it’s not all military-grade bombast. Colour me intrigued. In the meantime, though, you can enjoy Wall’s excellent music in Black Ops 6 from today - the lobby music, in particular, is a highlight of mine, because it puts me in mind of a massive 90s rock rave warehouse party. Just what you need when you’re talking down your adrenaline between matches.
Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. You can find all Wall’s music for the game here.