Cris Velasco is a prolific orchestral game music composer best known for his work on the God of War series and his recent high-profile collaborations with Sascha Dikiciyan. Velasco pursued the classic guitar, electric guitar, and piano from an early age to a high standard. He later graduated with a music composition degree at the UCLA School of Music. He began his career as an orchestrator for several Disney animated films such as Barbie of Swan Lake. Having become passionate about games as a child, he turned his attention to becoming a video game composer.
Velasco eventually scored his first game in 2003 when he was hired to create additional cinematic music for Battlestar Galactica. He later had additional music credits for Maximo vs. Army of Zin, Terminator 3: The Redemption, and Van Helsing. However, he had an uphill struggle to gain stable employment given the competitive nature of the industry. He had the tenacity to continue pursuing his dreams and was eventually assigned to compose the Sony&39;&39;s 2005 epic God of War. Though one of several composers, his crisis orchestral music attracted attention across the industry and secured his role on the two sequels.
In 2005, Velasco formed a musical collaboration with Sonic Mayhem producer Sascha Dikiciyan. They developed their relationship on video games such as BattleZone, Dark Messiah, and Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run. Uniquely, they collaborated on every track on these projects by morphing their respective specialised skills into one. Velasco used his skills as an orchestral composer to create the cues while Dikiciyan remixed and implemented them using his experience with electronic music and sound design. Their initial works were so successful that they were assigned to compose the piano-infused main theme of Splinter Cell: Double Age together.
Velasco has demonstrated his versatility away from video games. He has scored music for trailers, commercials, and music libraries on a semi-regular basis. He has also worked on the independent films Anderson&39;&39;s Cross and Omnichine. Away from Dikiciyan, he has worked on the orchestral video game scores to Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Jericho, Stuntman: Ignition, and Mythos. Nevertheless, the majority of his current projects are dominated by electro-acoustic collaborations with Dikiciyan, such as Hellgate: London, Beowulf, TMNT, Haze, Stranglehold, The Agency, and their biggest project to date, Prototype.
