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Composing for Pacific Rim: Breach Wars

 

It was either the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018. Ships Fly Up had already been around for about a year. I received a message in English from a complete stranger. I don’t remember exactly, but I think it said something about my work as a composer and a possible future collaboration. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t take it seriously — in fact, I mentally brushed it off, thinking, “Not relevant right now,” and replied with some standard phrase or something like that. Then I simply forgot about it.

 

A few weeks or maybe a month later, I got another message in English from the same person. Like the first time, I wasn’t really interested and didn’t fully understand what it was about. I just wanted to “wrap this up” as quickly as possible. Only later, through further communication, did it gradually dawn on me who this person was and what they were offering.

 

Turned out that somehow my music had caught the attention of people connected to Hollywood — well, almost Hollywood. There’s an American film called Pacific Rim. Its soundtrack was composed by Ramin Djawadi — the same composer who created the music for Game of Thrones, whose main theme (that “dum‑dum dum‑deedum‑dum”) many people hummed long after the show ended. He’s also behind the soundtracks for Prison Break, Westworld, Iron Man, Warcraft, and more.

 

In the West, there’s a company that works with the Hollywood film industry, producing mobile games to support major blockbusters as they hit theatres. For example, when Pacific Rim came out, a corresponding mobile game for iOS and Android was released. And these folks — based at the time in two offices, in Hong Kong and San Francisco — had reached out to me. According to the info on their website, their shareholders included Legendary Pictures, Lionsgate, Universal, Metro‑Goldwyn‑Mayer, and their partners were Marvel, Warner Brothers, and Walt Disney — companies you’ve probably seen in opening credits countless times.

 

One of the former executives — if I’m not mistaken, from Legendary Pictures — was actually leading the team that contacted me. How did they find me? Good question. Heck if I know. I have no exact answer. Probably my work just popped up somewhere online.

 

They offered me to compose the main theme for a new game, with one condition: I had to use Ramin Djawadi’s melody from Pacific Rim, which had already appeared in the film, as the foundation. I had experience writing soundtracks, so I agreed to this adventure, and we discussed the terms of collaboration. After all, the most I could lose was time — which I hoped to spend productively anyway.

 

At first, they very politely tried to convey the main idea of the track. I think I didn’t get it right away — they kept consulting and “guiding” me in the right direction for a while. But eventually, I caught the essence, and managed to write a version they liked. I brought in my own style, and composed some motifs from scratch. I added orchestration and metal (where would I be without it). Finally, after finishing all the details, the track was complete and accepted.

 

Throughout the process, I had doubts about whether this was really connected to Hollywood. Yes, I checked the company’s official website and seemed to find confirmation, but my Russian soul kept looking for a catch. My doubts were finally put to rest in March 2018, when the game Pacific Rim: Breach Wars was officially released on the Play Market (and was available until 2021 or 2022 — there might even be a re‑release). The developers listed were indeed the very people who’d contacted me. I breathed a sigh of relief.

 

After the release, they wrote to me that Legendary had highly appreciated my work, or something along those lines, and kept my contacts. The track, titled Maelstrom, became — as they informed me — the property of Legendary Pictures and Universal Music. In the author credits, next to my name, there was another one: the person who hadn’t composed the music but had been in touch with me and provided guidance. Well, so be it.

 

To this day, I still don’t know why Ramin Djawadi himself didn’t work on this track — he was already the main composer for the film’s soundtrack — and instead, they offered it to me. To be honest, in a wave of enthusiasm, I found his page on the then‑still‑active Facebook and sent him a message. I thought he couldn’t have missed such a “miracle” and must have listened to the official soundtrack made from his melody by some guy from a distant, cold Russian suburb. I wanted to hear a few words from the maestro — what he thought of my arrangement and all that.

 

Sadly, I never got a reply. Later, I also tried to send the developers my then‑only Ships Fly Up album, Journey to Ranucan (remember, this was 2018). I asked them to pass it along to the folks at Legendary or Universal — it felt like a chance to pave a path to magical horizons. But contact with me quickly faded away. Maybe somewhere on dusty Hollywood digital shelves, alongside film reels, there’s still an unlistened‑to strange folder with MP3 files, waiting for its moment. Whether that moment will ever come — only fate knows.

You can listen to the track here