They gathered in a 100-year-old Gothic church-turned-recording studio, a couple of blocks from Vanderbilt’s campus in Nashville. Eighty-five musicians, with their brass, wind and percussion instruments, cycled through the sanctuary to contribute to a unique task: Recording a song that fit the grandeur of the return of a college football video game.
The thunder of a spring storm boomed outside and a brood of cicadas chirped relentlessly. Inside, the orchestra created “Campus Clash,” the theme song for EA Sports College Football 25, arguably the most highly-anticipated sports video game of the past decade.
Steve Schnur, the worldwide executive and president of music for Electronic Arts, felt the game’s revival deserved a track that was unique yet true to the traditional sound of the sport. He recruited Emmy-winning composer Kris Bowers to craft an arrangement and gathered the orchestra to produce an original song that stands out among the game’s extensive library of fight songs and rousers.
A video game soundtrack can quickly become an earworm as players sink into the game for hours. It must be not only tolerable but enjoyable on repeat. That might especially be the case for College Football 25, which was released this week after an 11-year hiatus since the last NCAA Football game.
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“Campus Clash” features a strong brass melody and a funky drumline beat with a swagger. It wouldn’t be out of place as a hype-building theme opening a broadcast of a prime-time game, but Schnur is adamant that nostalgia isn’t the only ingredient.
“This is not going to sound like the band you heard on a marching band field in 1985 or in 2005,” he said.
More than 2,000 miles away from Nashville, Bowers listened in to the recording while working from his studio in Los Angeles. Best known for composing the scores of films like “Green Book” and “The Color Purple” as well as Netflix’s hit show “Bridgerton,” Bowers is also a video game veteran. He composed for two previous iterations of Madden and also wrote the main themes for the upcoming Madden 25 and NHL 25 games.
A double graduate of Juilliard with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz performance, Bowers didn’t get a lot of exposure to the sounds of college sports as a student because the prestigious performing arts school doesn’t have any athletic teams. To write something that would fit into a gameday atmosphere, he studied the sound of college marching bands. Schnur sent him the fight songs in the game to “get a sense of little drumline phrases that might be interesting to borrow” for the original composition, Bowers said.
“It’s definitely an amalgamation of sounds, but the biggest thing for us was for it to have this balance between a classic football theme that we’ve heard before but at the same time have it have a modern feel to it that feels a little bit different from things you’ve heard on TV for decades,” Bowers said.
To achieve that, Bowers pulled from contemporary tracks with marching bands, focusing on hip-hop songs that use brass melodies. Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance, which was an homage to HBCUs, and Mystikal’s “Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against The Wall)” were two big sources of inspiration.
Bowers begins his composition process by pinpointing the emotion of the scene (or, in this case, game). He wants the piece to make him feel the same way. Composing for video games can be challenging because there are no narrative beats to act as guides for a shifting sound or a punctuating note as there are in shows and movies. For this release, it was all about creating something that made gamers feel fired up.
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The goal is to have the theme transcend the game and become ingrained in college football culture.
“Hopefully in the future we can record other bands doing their version of it,” Bowers said. “Now that we have this version of it, even though we want the melody and the main melodic aspect of the theme to be something that sticks around, we want it to have its own life in terms of how its played and performed from here on out. Ideally if people really embrace that then we’d be able to celebrate other schools doing their version.”
Required reading
(Photo of Kris Bowers: Unique Nicole / Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
