They gathered in a 100-year-old Gothic church-turned-recording studio just blocks from the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville. Eighty-five musicians circulated through the sanctuary with brass, wind and percussion instruments to contribute to a unique mission: record a song that echoes the grandeur of college football’s video game return.
The spring rain outside is like thunder, and the cicadas are chirping incessantly. In it, the band composed “Campus Clash,” the theme song for EA Sports College Football 25, arguably the most anticipated sports video game of the past decade.
Steve Schnur, global CEO and president of music at Electronic Arts, believes the sport’s resurgence requires a track that is unique and true to the sport’s traditional sound. He hired Emmy Award-winning composer Kris Bowers for the arrangement and assembled an orchestra to craft an original song that stands out among the game’s vast library of fight songs and incitement songs.
Video game soundtracks can quickly become ear-splitting when players are immersed in a game for hours. Not only must it be tolerable, but it must be enjoyable to repeat. That’s especially the case with College Football 25, which releases 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 swaggering funky drum beats. The hype theme wouldn’t be out of place as a prime-time game opener, but Schnur is adamant that nostalgia isn’t the only factor.
“This doesn’t sound like a band you would have heard at a marching band field in 1985 or 2005,” he said.
More than 2,000 miles away from Nashville, Powers listened to the recording while working in a studio in Los Angeles. Powers, known for his work on film scores such as “Green Book” and “The Color Purple” as well as Netflix’s hit show “Bridgerton,” is also a video game veteran. He composed the music for the first two editions of Madden, as well as the theme songs for the upcoming Madden 25 and NHL 25.
Powers is a dual-major graduate of Juilliard with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz performance, but he didn’t have much exposure to college sports as a student because the prestigious performing arts school didn’t have any athletic teams. . To write something that fit the game-day mood, he studied the sound of a college marching band. Powers said Schnur sent him the game’s battle song to “get some ideas for some snare drum phrases that might be fun to borrow” from the original work.
“It’s definitely a fusion of sounds, but the most important thing for us is that it strikes a balance between classic football themes that we’ve heard before, but also has a modern feel that feels a bit like what you’ve heard on TV for decades. It’s something different,” Powers said.
To achieve this, Powers drew inspiration from contemporary repertoire of marching bands, focusing on hip-hop songs that used brass melodies. Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance paid homage to HBCUs, with Mystikal’s “Bouncein’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against The Wall)” being two major inspirations.
Powers begins his creative process by pinpointing the emotion of a scene (or in this case, a game). He hopes this piece will make him feel the same way. Composing music for video games can be challenging because there are no narrative beats to guide changing sounds or punctuation like there are in shows and movies. For this version, it’s all about creating something that players can get excited about.
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The goal is for the themes to transcend the game and become ingrained in college football culture.
“Hopefully in the future we can record versions with other bands,” Powers said. “Now that we have this version, although we hope that the melodic and main melodic aspects of the theme can be preserved, we hope that it will have a life of its own from now on in the way it is played and performed. Ideally, if people really Accept this and we can celebrate other schools launching their versions.
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(Photo by Chris Powers: Unique Nicole/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
