Who owns the Halo theme tune now? (Off-Topic)

by kapowaz, Tuesday, August 05, 2014, 07:54 (3767 days ago) @ Claude Errera

You'd think that given that the Halo series is now Microsoft's intellectual property, this would also include the theme tune to the Halo games that Marty composed, but they elected not to re-use it in Halo 4, and the teaser for Halo: Guardians suggests 343i are sticking with creating their own, new theme. But is that a creative decision or is it because the rights to that theme still reside with Marty? In which case, with him no longer even working at Bungie, does that mean they might metaphorically gather dust in the cupboard?

I've always found it interesting that for game tie-ins of major movie IPs like Star Wars and Harry Potter tend to go one of two routes: they either use the exact music from the films (e.g. X-Wing: Alliance, which had snippets from the whole series on the game disc) or they hire another composer entirely to create a thematically-similar but most definitely entirely new soundtrack (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, for example). But maybe that was because the main theme ‘belongs’ to John Williams? Is there a similar situation with Marty?

Feel free to chime in here, by the way Marty :)