They gathered in a century-old Gothic church-turned-recording studio just blocks from Vanderbilt’s Nashville campus. Eighty-five musicians, with their brass, woodwind and percussion instruments, roamed the sanctuary to contribute to a unique task: recording a song worthy of the return of a college football video game.
The thunder of a spring storm rumbled outside and a brood of cicadas sang incessantly. Inside, the orchestra premiered “Campus Clash,” the theme song of EA Sports College Football 25probably the most anticipated sport video game of the last decade.
Steve Schnur, Worldwide Head of Music and President of Electronic Arts, felt the game’s revival deserved a unique piece that would still be true to the sport’s traditional sound. He recruited Emmy Award-winning composer Kris Bowers to create an arrangement and assembled the orchestra to produce an original song that would stand out among the game’s vast library of fight and jump songs.
A video game soundtrack can quickly become an earworm when players immerse themselves in the game for hours on end. It needs to be not only tolerable but also enjoyable to listen to on repeat. This might be especially true 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” is a powerful brass melody and a funky drum beat with a certain poise. It wouldn’t be out of place as a kickoff theme for a prime-time game, but Schnur is adamant that nostalgia isn’t the only ingredient.
“It’s not going to sound like the band you heard on a marching band field in 1985 or 2005,” he said.
More than 2,000 miles away from Nashville, Bowers listened to the recording while working in his Los Angeles studio. Best known for composing the scores for films like “Green Book” and “The Color Purple” as well as the hit Netflix series “Bridgerton,” Bowers is also a video game veteran. He composed for two previous iterations of Madden and also wrote the title themes for the upcoming Madden 25 and NHL 25 games.
A Juilliard graduate with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in jazz performance, Bowers didn’t have much exposure to the sounds of college sports as a student because the prestigious performing arts school doesn’t have any sports teams. To write something that would fit into the game-day atmosphere, he studied the sound of college marching bands. Schnur sent him the game’s fight songs to “get an idea of what little drum phrases might be interesting to borrow” for the original composition, Bowers said.
“It’s definitely an amalgamation of sounds, but the most important thing for us was to have that balance between a classic football theme that we’ve heard before, but at the same time have a modern feel that seems a little different than what you’ve heard on TV for decades,” Bowers said.
To achieve this, Bowers drew inspiration from contemporary pieces with brass bands, focusing on hip-hop songs that use brass melodies. Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance, which was a tribute to HBCUs, and Mystikal’s “Bouncin’ Back (Bumpin’ Me Against the Wall)” were two big sources of inspiration.
Bowers begins his composition process by identifying the emotion of the scene (or, in this case, the 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 guide a changing sound or a punctuating note like there are in TV shows and movies. For this release, it was about creating something that would move players.
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The goal is to make the theme transcend the game and permeate the culture of college football.
“We hope to record other groups doing their own versions in the future,” Bowers said. “Now that we have this version, while we want the melody and the main melodic aspect of the theme to stick, we want it to have a life of its own in terms of how it’s played and presented from now on. Ideally, if people really embrace that idea, then we could celebrate other schools doing their versions.”
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(Photo by Kris Bowers: Unique Nicole / Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
