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Jesper Kyd

From Silents music disks to Hitman and Assassin's Creed

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A Danish composer who wrote Amiga demo music for Kefrens and The Silents, including the score for Hardwired. He was the in-house musician at the Copenhagen developer Zyrinx on Sub-Terrania, stayed in New York when the team went home, and scored IO Interactive's Hitman games, four Assassin's Creed games and the Borderlands series. Hitman: Contracts won him a BAFTA in 2005.

In January 1991 a British public-domain library advertised a new music demo in Amiga Format on the strength of one name: “Sound of the Silents… Great music from Jesper Kydd”. The magazines spelled him Kid, Kydd and Kyde, but the name was already the selling point. Jesper Kyd was a Danish teenager writing tracker music for Amiga demo groups. Within a decade he was scoring Hitman for the friends he had met in the scene, and in 2005 one of those scores won a BAFTA.

Fast facts

  • Born: 1972, Denmark.
  • Scene groups: music for Kefrens demos from 1988, then The Silents.
  • Demos: Sound of Silents (1990), Global Trash and Hardwired (1991), Optic Nerve (1993).
  • Games: Sub-Terrania and Red Zone for Zyrinx; the Hitman series (2000–2006); Freedom Fighters (2003); four Assassin’s Creed games (2007–2011); Borderlands (from 2009).
  • Award: BAFTA for original music, Hitman: Contracts, 2005.

The scene years

Kyd started on the family piano. He told Wireframe that a Commodore 64, which he got at 13, changed what he could do: “You could have a theme, and you could have something arranged around the theme. You could have a bass line… It was almost like you didn’t have to sit and play everything.” In 2006 he told Edge that “the emotion game composers were able to put into C64 scores is what attracted me to the medium”, with an “experimental approach that reminded me of artists such as Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre”.

The demo scene took him further. The scene database Demozoo lists his first credits in 1987 and music for the Danish group Kefrens from 1988, including Megademo VIII in 1990. He then joined The Silents, the Swedish group with a Danish section. CU Amiga reviewed the group’s music demo Sound of Silents in December 1990, “featuring music by Jesper Kid”, and found “some fantastic tunes, a great intro, and some really wild effects on the selection screen”.

In 1991 he wrote the music for two of The Silents’ best-known productions. Demozoo credits him with Global Trash, and with Global Trash II, which was made on videotape and, according to Jimmy Maher’s history of the Amiga, reportedly shown on MTV Europe. At The Party in Denmark that December, Hardwired, made with the Danish group Crionics, came second, with Kyd’s music under nearly eleven minutes of vector graphics. He also wrote the music for Optic Nerve, the PC demo that came second to Future Crew’s Second Reality at Assembly ’93.

Zyrinx and America

Through the scene Kyd met David Guldbrandsen, Karsten Hvidberg and Jesper Jørgensen, who later founded IO Interactive. With them, he told Wireframe, he started the game developer Zyrinx. Its first game was the Mega Drive shoot ’em up Sub-Terrania, published by Sega in 1994. Edge called it the work of “little-known programming team Zyrinx”, and said it had “some great graphics and sound to back up the gameplay”. Several of the Hardwired team were at Zyrinx too, among them the artist Mikael Balle.

“Sub-Terrania’s success prompted the team to move to America,” Wireframe wrote. Zyrinx worked as the internal team of Scavenger, an American company that Edge described in 1995 as having a “Sega background”. The in-game credits of the Mega Drive shoot ’em up Red Zone (1994) and the Saturn racer Scorcher list Kyd for the music, and the Sega Retro wiki records that Red Zone was developed under the working title Hardwired. He also wrote the music for Sega’s The Adventures of Batman & Robin on the Mega Drive in 1995. Scorcher reached the shops in 1997, by which time Edge was writing of “the dream that was Scavenger” collapsing. The rest of the team returned to Copenhagen and set up IO Interactive. Kyd stayed in New York.

Hitman

IO asked him to score its first game, Hitman: Codename 47 (2000). “The only brief I was really given was that they wanted something unique and original,” he told Wireframe. “I had been working with these people from the demoscene days, so I had proven myself and they trusted my instincts.” The game’s music was interactive, built with Microsoft’s DirectMusic system, which he found “almost like a database programme”, so he wrote the music outside it and fitted it back in afterwards.

For Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002), IO’s chief executive Janos Flösser proposed a full symphonic score with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and Choir. “I had never written a symphonic score before,” Kyd said, “and I’m like, ‘Are you sure you have the right guy?’” For IO’s Freedom Fighters (2003), a game about an invasion of New York, he worked with the Hungarian Radio Choir, and he wrote much of the score after 11 September 2001, when he was in Europe and struggling to get back to Manhattan. Hitman: Contracts (2004) turned darker and more electronic, and in 2005 it won the BAFTA for original music. Hitman: Blood Money (2006) was his last in the series. In his words, he wanted “to combine Contracts’ electronics with the orchestra of Silent Assassin”. For Hitman: Absolution IO turned to the Danish composers Peter Peter and Peter Kyed, and the game’s director, Tore Blystad, told Edge in 2011: “Kyd is a great composer and we will work with him again.”

Assassin’s Creed and Borderlands

Ubisoft Montreal pitched him its next game “in a hotel room at E3”, he recalled: “You can go anywhere in the environment that you want? You can scale buildings?” For Assassin’s Creed (2007) the studio gave him three words, “tragic”, “war” and “mysticism”, and the in-game machine that replays history, the Animus, led him to make everything “sound like it’s coming through a filter to remind you that you’re in some kind of simulator”. He scored four games in the series between 2007 and 2011. The theme “Ezio’s Family”, from Assassin’s Creed II (2009), became the series’ recurring motif and is now played in concert halls.

He has scored the Borderlands shooters from the first game in 2009 to Borderlands 3 in 2019, and Edge listed Darksiders II among his work in 2012. He came back to Assassin’s Creed for Valhalla in 2020. His later work includes Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (2022) and the music for Samson: A Tyndalston Story (2026) by the studio Liquid Swords. Talking to NME about Samson, he looked back at the scene of his teens: “It was always about who can do something unusual, who can surprise people and who can blow the lid off stuff.”

Sources

  • Public-domain library advertisements: Amiga Format issue 18, January 1991, and issue 19, February 1991 (“Sound of the Silents… Great music from Jesper Kydd”); Amiga Computing issue 32, January 1991 (Sound of Silents, “music by Jesper Kyd”).
  • CU Amiga, December 1990, public-domain demos feature: Sound of Silents, “featuring music by Jesper Kid”.
  • Matthias Sundström, “A Symphony of Shadows”, interview with Jesper Kyd, Wireframe issue 23, September 2019, pp. 18–22: the Commodore 64, the demo scene, the founders of IO Interactive and Zyrinx, the move to America, the Hitman scores, Freedom Fighters, Assassin’s Creed and Borderlands 3.
  • Edge issue 158, January 2006, feature on game music: Kyd on C64 music and on the Hitman scores, “BAFTA award-winning composer for the Hitman series, Freedom Fighters”.
  • Edge issue 8, May 1994: review of Sub-Terrania, developer Zyrinx.
  • Edge issue 25, October 1995: Scavenger and “its internal label Zyrinx”.
  • Edge issue 43, March 1997: review of Scorcher, “Scavenger’s internal Zyrinx development team”.
  • Sega Saturn Magazine issue 20, June 1997: review of Scorcher, “Coded by Danish programmers Zyrinx (the people responsible for the Megadrive hit Sub-Terrania and the sequel Red Zone)”.
  • Edge issue 229, July 2011: Hitman: Absolution preview; Kyd not scoring the game, and the director’s comment.
  • Edge issue 240, May 2012: Kyd scoring Heroes & Generals, with Assassin’s Creed, Darksiders 2 and Borderlands among his credits.
  • Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), p. 190: Global Trash II on MTV Europe.
  • The Party 1991 and Assembly ‘93, results (web, secondary copies of the organisers’ files): Hardwired second; Optic Nerve second. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1991/theparty91/results.txt, https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1993/assembly93/results.txt
  • The Amiga Book, revised edition (Imagine Publishing, 2015), p. 134: Hardwired “clocks in at nearly eleven minutes”.
  • Demozoo, scener entry for Jesper Kyd (web, secondary): credits from 1987, Kefrens productions, Global Trash, Global Trash II and Optic Nerve. https://demozoo.org/sceners/434/
  • Sega Retro, entries for Sub-Terrania, Red Zone, Scorcher and The Adventures of Batman & Robin (Mega Drive) (web, secondary): in-game and manual credits, and Red Zone’s working title. https://segaretro.org/Red_Zone
  • GameZone, “Hitman: Contracts Awarded Best ‘Original Music’ At 2005 BAFTA Games Awards” (web, secondary). https://www.gamezone.com/news/hitman_contracts_awarded_best_quot_original_music_quot_at_2005_bafta_games_awards/
  • Jesper Kyd, official website, credits (web, secondary): Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Samson. https://www.jesperkyd.com/
  • Ali Shutler, interview with Jesper Kyd on Samson, NME, 16 April 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/jesper-kyd-interview-samson-tyndalston-story-soundtrack-massive-attack-trip-hop-3940609

See also

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