An Interview with Gareth Coker

To celebrate his first full-length tv series score, Gareth Coker joins The Film Scorer podcast! You video game fans in particular may know Gareth from his work scoring games like Ori, Ark, and Halo Infinite, but Gareth hasn't stopped there. Given that he's already scored the various Ark games, it's no surprise that he was tapped to score Ark: The Animated Series, the animated adaptation of the Ark games. As such, we spend much of our interview talking about his scores for both the show and the game series and the interaction between the two, such as shared palettes and themes (including for the Broodmother fights). Along the way, we also talk about things like the score for Shōgun (Gareth's a fan), the keys behind making great exploration music (with a shoutout to Jesper Kyd's score for Assassin's Creed 2), and plenty more.

Candidly I wasn't super familiar with Gareth's music previously, other than his work on Ori and the Blind Forest, largely because I don't really play video games, which in turn probably limits how much video game music I listen to broadly. So preparing to talk with Gareth gave me the chance/excuse to start digging into his other scores, primarily for the Ark games. With Ark: The Animated Series, Gareth is able to bring the Ark palette into tv, with a massive orchestral score that's actually packed but also heavily focused on building great character themes. The success and quality of the score is, in part, a testament to the resources given to Gareth in the scoring process, something I'd love to see every studio do!

You can find out more about Gareth on his website. Ark: The Animated Series is currently streaming on Paramount+ while Gareth's score, and much of his other music, is widely available digitally.