Have you played “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6”? The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up the game and jump into the single-player portion (if that’s your thing) is the theme. There is only one trumpet, playing this gorgeous and simple theme, to start. Bass and drums slowly play in the background and the scene is set – it feels lonely, isolated, a whole body waiting for a storm.
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This is all intentional. That music—the feelings it makes you feel, the visuals it evokes—is meant to provoke you. Like a soldier entering a skirmish, your odds are slim and your chances of success are slim. It’s part of Call of Duty’s power fantasy, composer Jack Wall Know this.
“Black ops is always about one person or a small group of people versus a big, dark, shady underworld organization,” he told me in an interview. “Every time, that’s the nature of Black Ops. So, for the Black Ops 6 theme, I started with a speaker line and by the end, the others [in the orchestra] Just in the swimming pool, playing with the same theme. This is by design; you start with yourself and then fight everyone. The whole world is exploding [laughter]”.
Wall has been a part of Call of Duty for a long time. In addition to composing theme songs for every game since Black Ops 2, he’s also been keeping a close eye on Zombies maps elsewhere in the series (particularly Vanguard and MW3 2023). He knows CoD like the back of his hand, and if you watch any YouTube video of his soundtrack playing, you’ll see tons of fans praising his in-depth knowledge of the series. He’s as much a part of Black Ops as gunplay or time travel.
But this is not always the case. Before Wall started submitting hundreds of minutes of music per game to Treyarch and Activision Blizzard, he became a well-known entity for other reasons. For example, he composed and produced the music for Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, the latter of which may be my favorite track from a Western RPG in Suicide Mission.
“I would say one of the reasons I got into Call of Duty was because He explained, “Because everyone who was working on Black Ops 2… they were looking for a new composer after Black Ops 1. And it just so happened that they were all fans of the Mass Effect 2 soundtrack.
“Brian Tuey comes on, he’s been the audio director at Treyarch for 15, 16 years now. When he heard the Mass Effect 2 soundtrack and found out I did it, he was blown away because we I worked with a small game company called Gigawatt as early as 10 years ago, producing games for children on behalf of Mattel and Disney.”
Wall told me that he and Tuey—the two men who have become synonymous with Call of Duty and the bastion of the world’s most “wow” FPS shooters—actually met while working on Barbie.
“So we made this game together, and then we made Black Ops 2 together [laughter]. My daughter – who was four at the time – was a huge fan of Barbie Secret Agent and we played the game together all the time. 10 years later, I’m working on Black Ops 2 with the same people [laughter]. My career was a climb up the web; I ended up working on everything from Barbie to Myst, Mass Effect to Black Ops. It was quite a pleasant journey. “
But what next? Wall slyly told me that he’s currently working on something “more fantastical,” so it’s not all military-grade bombast. Interesting to me. In the meantime, though, you can enjoy Wall’s excellent music in Black Ops 6 starting today – the lobby music, in particular, was a highlight for me as it reminded me of a big 90’s game Era rock rave warehouse party. When you’re talking about lowering your adrenaline between games, this is exactly what you need.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. You can find all of Wall’s game music here.
