Hollywood composer Michael Giacchino (Mission: Impossible III, Lost) has partnered once again with Electronic Arts on the best-selling WWII video game franchise originally conceived by Steven Spielberg, Medal of Honor. This marks the fifth time Giacchino has partnered with EA LA on the best-selling franchise. Medal of Honor Airborne ships for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this summer.

"Next generation consoles allow film and game sound to meld in the same way as they are in the visual world," said Giacchino. "You now have full 5.1 surround sound, so you're no longer worried about stereo tracks that will be played in 8-Bit. The music is playing just as it would in a movie or on your home theater."

Giacchino returned to the WWII franchise because of EA LA's ability to tell more emotional stories using this new technology. The new game allows players to fight through all six airborne drops of the second World War and choose where to land and how to fight against the Nazis in a fully realized, interactive experience.

"I was amazed at the level of detail in the technology but also in the storytelling," said Giacchino. "EA had always gone to great lengths in telling great stories within their video games. But in this one it seemed like they went further. They really do care about the story and that is not always prevalent at video game companies. That's an area where a lot of them are still evolving."

Giacchino owes his success in Hollywood to video games and in particular to writer/director/producer JJ Abrams, who's a big gamer. After hearing his work in a game, Abrams called Giacchino up and hired him to work on his TV projects like Alias and Lost and that lead to film work, as well.

"When I started, I couldn't get a meeting with an agent or a studio or anything," said Giacchino. "Even though I had worked on video games for Steven Spielberg, they didn't hear the word Spielberg; they heard the word video game and thought beeps and all of these awful ear bleeding sounds. We were using symphony orchestras to create game scores, but there was such a prejudice against games in Hollywood that it was impossible to get through."

That's all changed now, according to Giacchino. And he's freely working in both mediums. In addition to the Medal of Honor: Vanguard game, he's scored Codemasters' Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, which was developed by Los Angeles-based Spark Unlimited and ships this fall for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. He's also working on the score for Ubisoft's video game based on the hit TV series, Lost.

"I like to have a hand [on the project], if I'm working on a film or TV series, and when there's a video game, on both," said Giacchino. "I was always disappointed that when you got a video game based on a film there was suddenly music that sounded nothing like what was in the movie or it sounded like an approximate rip-off of what was in the movie. I like for the video game to feel like the property it grew out of."

Giacchino scored both the Alias TV series and video game and The Incredibles movie and two video games. He's currently working with Abrams on the score for the 2008 Star Trek film. Giacchino got his start scoring for games like The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Chaos Island and has continued in this medium, scoring games like Black, Call of Duty, and Secret Weapons Over Normandy.