The first Splinter Cell’s soundtrack was fairly simple from a strictly musical perspective, but the strange amalgamation of moods that it managed to conjure from a few tinny drum loops and bass pulses really set up the series’ dark world of intrigue and ninja-esque shadow stalking. The tracks build a brooding, tense quality to the world, as well as just enough off-kilter string instrumentation and chills-down-your-spine vocals to paint everything a nearly alien quality. It’s lonely music for a lonely game; it sounds just enough like espionage music to make sense, but just weird enough to keep you on your toes.

Pandora Tomorrow was followed up by none other than Jack Wall, a game composer who was much less well-known back in 2004. Certainly the most eerie of the series, Jack Wall’s work for the series broached the sounds of survival horror. The tracks are all set around one distinct and fairly “spy movie” sounding theme, but that’s where convention ends. Each level sounds like some new, horrifying remix of that Main Menu track, each one twisting it, dissecting it, and turning it inside out in some new and awful way. This game’s score makes the terrorist dens Sam Fisher crawls through simply ooze dread and unease. In fact, the game’s score almost depicts Sam as some sort of serial killer, following his enemies through dark allies with a gun while ambient tracks that wouldn’t feel out of place in “Halloween” play. It’s dark as night, and entirely fitting for what is possibly the most no-nonsense game in the series. Pandora Tomorrow is in some strange way my favorite of the series, if only because of how weirdly experimental Jack Wall takes the score.

And then here it is: the big, the bad, the near-perfect Chaos Theory. Amon Tobin brings his musical abilities to out-weird every other composer from the series and manages to craft what is arguably the most unique sound any game soundtrack has ever had. Tobin’s music is strange, it’s ominous, there’s almost too many moods going on to truly interpret any one of them. The music just goes to work, reaching you on an almost primal level. It knows how to ramp up to action steadily, while always exercising restraint and never taking the obvious way forward. The sounds from each of the various tracks shouldn’t even really fit together, but somehow they all make sense as one. Maybe that’s why this soundtrack is so perfect, because each time I hear it I realize just how well it all fits together, inside or outside the game. Hell, this score is so good that Amon Tobin’s next album borrowed a lot of the sounds he developed for it. Simply genius.

Double Agent certainly represented a pivotal moment of change for the series, including in the music. Strangely enough, as the Splinter Cell games began to play outside the light-and-shadows sandbox, and begin experimenting more, the music went the opposite way, leaving behind the strange electronic ambiance of Jack Wall and Amon Tobin for the more traditional structure of Michael McCann’s compositions. That being said, I adore Michael McCann’s work for Double Agent. Though not nearly as ambitious as Tobin’s work for Chaos Theory, McCann’s guitar-driven score for the 4th entry in the series has such a potent sense of melancholy that refuses to give way to background music. The score has the whole “globe trotting spy movie” thing down, but it paints it all in a strange sadness that shouldn’t quite work, but results in some of the most beautiful and infinitely listenable music I’ve ever heard in a game. Perfect choice for the more personal Splinter Cell.

And here begins the decline. Though Conviction had some pretty interesting contributions from Amon Tobin, the majority of the soundtrack for this game had descended to traditional Hollywood spy film music. Gone is the ambiance and intrigue of the prior games, replaced instead with a theme that just sort of exists. It’s by no means bad. This score is really well done, in fact, but when compared with a game series that so strongly stood opposed to convention, it just comes off like giving up.

Finally, there’s Blacklist. Don’t even get me started on whatever this straight-up abomination is…