Martin O'Donnell (born May 1, 1955) is an American composer, audio director, and sound designer. He is most famous for his work with the video game developer Bungie on games such as the Myth series, Oni, the Halo series, and Destiny. O'Donnell worked with Michael Salvatori to create all the music scores for these games. He also directed voice actors and designed sound effects for the Halo trilogy.
O'Donnell began his career by writing music for television and radio jingles, such as the Flintstones Chewable Vitamins jingle. He also composed music for radio stations and films. In 1997, his company, TotalAudio, created sound effects for the game Riven. This led to O'Donnell starting to compose music for video games. After working on Myth II, Bungie hired him to create music for other projects, including Oni and Halo: Combat Evolved. O'Donnell joined Bungie's team ten days before the company was bought by Microsoft. He served as the audio director for all Bungie projects until he was fired in April 2014.
The music O'Donnell created for the Halo trilogy received praise from critics and earned him several awards. The commercial release of the Halo 2 soundtrack was the best-selling video game soundtrack in the United States. He composed music for Halo 3 (2007), Halo 3: ODST (2009), and Halo: Reach (2010). His last project with Bungie was the 2014 game Destiny. O'Donnell won a lawsuit against Bungie for unpaid wages and stock ownership. Afterward, he co-founded Highwire Games and composed the music for their first virtual reality game, Golem, which was released in late 2019.
In 2024, O'Donnell ran as a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Nevada's 3rd congressional district. He placed fourth in the Republican primary. He is running again for the same district in the 2026 election and has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
Early life and education
O'Donnell describes his childhood as "typical." He took piano lessons and wanted to form a rock band during his time in junior high school. His father worked in film, and his mother taught piano. Even though he liked progressive and fusion rock, O'Donnell studied classical music and composition at Wheaton College Conservatory of Music. He earned a Master's degree in composition with honors from the University of Southern California in the early 1980s.
Career
After earning his degree, O'Donnell moved to Chicago. He expected to teach at the American Conservatory of Music, but the job didn't happen. Instead, he worked as a grip in the film and television business. O'Donnell began his musical career in this field after a colleague who knew of his music background asked him to write for a film. O'Donnell spoke with his friend Michael Salvatori, who had his own recording studio, and offered to split the profits from the job with him. The two became constant partners.
After completing a film score and a few commercials, the two decided to quit their day jobs and produce music in Chicago. They founded a production company called TotalAudio. O'Donnell composed the music for jingles for Mr. Clean and Flintstones Chewable Vitamins. After fifteen years of composing for TV and radio commercials, he decided he wanted to work on game soundtracks and move away from commercial-sounding music. "I was hoping to find some other medium that would be new and cutting-edge and sort of the Wild West," he recalled.
In 1993, Dick Staub, a Chicago radio personality and friend of O'Donnell's, asked if his eighteen-year-old son Josh could visit O'Donnell's studio. Josh was interested in computer games and audio. O'Donnell agreed, and during their conversation, Josh mentioned that he had friends in Spokane, Washington, who were making a game called Myst, which O'Donnell had never heard of. After hearing the theme music to the game, O'Donnell realized the game industry was creating "legitimate music" with dramatic elements. O'Donnell became acquainted with the game's developers, including brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, and was hired four years later as a sound designer for Myst's sequel, Riven. Among the games Riven's developers played in their downtime was a title called Marathon, created by Chicago-based Bungie. After returning to Chicago, O'Donnell emailed a Bungie staffer and pursued a job.
TotalAudio produced the music for Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords the same year. The company later composed the music for Valkyrie Studio's Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator, during which O'Donnell met Steve Downes, whom he would later recommend as the voice actor for the Master Chief. O'Donnell described the work for Septerra Core as his most difficult assignment. During the production, the TotalAudio studio burned to the ground, and O'Donnell had to be rescued through a window to save some 20 hours of recordings.
After producing the music for Myth II, Bungie contracted O'Donnell for several of their other projects, including the game Oni. In 1999, Bungie wanted to re-negotiate the contracts for Oni, and the negotiations resulted in O'Donnell joining the Bungie team ten days before the company was bought by Microsoft. O'Donnell was one of a handful of Bungie employees who remained working at the company until his termination in April 2014. While O'Donnell worked at Bungie, Salvatori handled the business side of TotalAudio.
After producing the music for Oni, O'Donnell was tasked with composing the music for Bungie's next project, which would be unveiled at E3 2000. After talking with Joseph Staten, O'Donnell decided the music needed to be "big, exciting, and unusual with a classical orchestra touch to give it some weight and stature. We also wanted it to have some sort of 'ancient' feel to it." O'Donnell came up with the idea of opening the piece with Gregorian chant and wrote down the melody in his car. Because he did not know how long the presentation would be, O'Donnell created "smushy" opening and closing sections that could be expanded or cut as time required to back up a rhythmic middle section. The music was recorded and sent to New York the same night the piece was finished. The resulting music became the basis for the Halo series' "highly recognizable" signature sound, and what has been called one of the best-known video game themes. The use of the chant in the main theme has been credited with contributing to popular interest in the genre. Halo's music used an interactive engine to change music in response to the player's actions; this non-linear method has since become widespread. The scores for Halo and its sequel Halo 2 garnered awards such as The Game Developers Choice Award and Best Original Video Game Soundtrack from Rolling Stone.
The music for Halo 3 contained refinements and revisions to previous themes heard in the series, as O'Donnell stressed the importance of using previous motifs in the final installment of the trilogy. O'Donnell wanted to "blow out" the epic sounds from the first game. He also introduced a distinctive piano theme that had not been heard before, and made its appearance in the Halo 3 announcement teaser. In an interview, O'Donnell stated that he has always approached music from the keyboard, and that at the Electronic Entertainment Expo—where the trailer would first be shown—he had a feeling that "no [other announcement] would start with a piano." O'Donnell planned on composing the music "at the last minute," saying he had no intention of producing a large amount of music that would never be used. "It drives everyone crazy but it worked for me in the past and it works for the game in the best way. Writing music before the end just doesn't work for me," he said.
For Halo 3: ODST, a planned expansion to Halo 3 that became a full game, O'Donnell and Salvatori abandoned all previous Halo themes and started anew. Due to ODST's shift to a new protagonist, O'Donnell created music that was evocative of past Halo but branched in a different direction. Since Bungie was aiming for a smaller, detective story feel, O'Donnell felt that a jazz-influenced approach worked best in echoing the film noir atmosphere.
In creating music for Halo: Reach, a prequel to Combat Evolved, O'Donnell wanted to create music with a "grittier" feel because of the dark nature of the story. Reach was Bungie's
Collections
O'Donnell's music has been collected into different soundtrack albums. For Halo, O'Donnell created "frozen" arrangements that showed how the music would sound during gameplay. The Halo Original Soundtrack sold more than 40,000 copies and was followed by two separate releases of the music for Halo 2. These two albums of the Halo 2 Original Soundtrack were created by Nile Rodgers. The first album was released at the same time as the video game in 2004 and became the most popular game soundtrack in the United States. The second album was released more than a year after the music was finished.
The Halo 3 Original Soundtrack came out in November 2007. It included a song chosen from many entries judged by O'Donnell, Rodgers, and others. All of O'Donnell's music for the series was collected into a single collection called Halo Trilogy—The Complete Original Soundtracks in December 2008. This collection also included preview songs written by Stephen Rippy, the composer for Halo Wars. The music for Halo 3: ODST was released as a two-disc set when the game came out on September 22, 2009. The soundtrack for Reach was available as digital downloads on the same day the game was released, September 14, 2010. A physical two-disc version of the Reach soundtrack was released on September 28, 2010.
On September 26, 2014, O'Donnell's soundtrack for Bungie's first game in the Destiny series was released, several months after he left the company.
Composition
O'Donnell has used an Apple Macintosh computer to create music. In an interview, he said he wishes his software could easily update to newer versions. He explained that for the past twenty years, whenever a new version of technology is released, older versions are no longer available, and he often loses access to tools he relied on. O'Donnell was involved in both creating music and putting it into action. He was Bungie's Audio lead and composed music in a sound-proofed room in the corner of Bungie's office, which was called the "Ivory Tower."
O'Donnell mentioned in an interview that he believes one issue with some games is that they play music non-stop, which he thinks weakens the overall effect. He said composers are often forced to write background music or very simple music that does not strongly express emotions, which he considers a problem. O'Donnell prefers to write music toward the end of a game's development because he wants to match the timing of final scenes and gameplay changes. He credits part of the success of the Halo theme to his experience writing short musical pieces called "jingles." For that music, O'Donnell had to ensure the melody would be easy for people to remember after 15 to 30 seconds. He encouraged Bungie to hire singers and musicians to record the theme before an event called Macworld to make a strong impression.
Some video game composers O'Donnell admires include Jeremy Soule, Jason Hayes, Koji Kondo, and Nobuo Uematsu. He noted that he is older than most game composers and was not directly influenced by them. Instead, he was influenced by classical music from composers like Beethoven, Brahms, and Barber, as well as progressive rock bands such as Jethro Tull and Genesis. He also lists Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin, and Hans Zimmer as his favorite movie composers.
In addition to composing, O'Donnell arranges his own music. He created a special arrangement used for a Halo 3 segment during a performance called Video Games Live in London, after which he appeared on stage. He has also performed with and without Salvatori at other events featuring his music, including later Video Games Live tours and Play! A Video Game Symphony.
Political career
O'Donnell calls himself a political conservative, and coworkers at Bungie described him as the employee with the most conservative views at the company.
In March 2024, O'Donnell announced on his Discord server that he planned to run as a Republican candidate for Nevada's 3rd congressional district in the 2024 House of Representatives elections. He aimed to challenge the current Democratic representative, Susie Lee. O'Donnell supported President Donald Trump and focused his campaign on promoting family values, supporting the middle class, and improving border security. However, according to The Nevada Independent, O'Donnell had previously called Trump an "idiot" in a 2016 social media post and said he "loathed" Trump in 2017 before later expressing support for him. O'Donnell was defeated in the 2024 Republican primary, coming in fourth place behind Elizabeth Helgelien, Dan Schwartz, and Drew Johnson.
Legal Dispute with Bungie
In 2019, O'Donnell started sharing content about Destiny and an unreleased orchestral piece called Music of the Spheres on his YouTube channel and Bandcamp page, including an album named Sketches for MotS. In April 2021, Bungie sent O'Donnell legal papers for contempt of court, stating that his sharing of the material broke a 2015 court order. On July 12, 2021, Judge Regina Cahan of the Superior Court of Washington for King County ruled in favor of Bungie. The judge ordered O'Donnell to allow a search of his electronic devices, pay Bungie all money earned from Bandcamp sales, and post a court-approved statement on his social media accounts admitting he had no legal right to keep or share the material. Bungie requested about $100,000 in legal costs, which O'Donnell's representatives called unfair. O'Donnell posted the required statement in November 2021.
Personal life
O'Donnell and his wife, Marcie, have two daughters. O'Donnell's children were part of a singing choir. They performed in a commercial jingle for Flintstones Chewable Vitamins that O'Donnell composed. O'Donnell's father did voice work for Myth as the "Surly Dwarf," as well as "The Prophet of Objection" in Halo 2.
Although O'Donnell worked with Bungie for many years, he remained co-owner and president of TotalAudio. In 2024, The Nevada Independent reported that O'Donnell has a net worth of nearly $74 million. Much of this money is held in stocks through individual retirement accounts and investment portfolios.