Games and Sound
Contributed by Cameron Wiest
Videos games have a come a long way since classics some of us may remember such as "Pong" or even "Arkanoid". Back then game sound was not so much a part of the production of a video game, as much as a side effect of creating electronic entertainment. We are making software for a piece of hardware that has audio outputs ? might as well make some sound. These days a production team has many different departments: Programming, Art, Design, Sound and so on. Depending on budget there are more or less teams and goals ? likewise there is more or less effort involved. Back in the day, generally speaking, its fair to say that there were much smaller production teams. It also seams fair to say that for the most part, the sound department was really just the programmer(s). In the early years, if you were a game sound guy it usually meant that you wrote the music ? you had a knack for generating pages and pages and pages of code that, once compiled, would miraculously turn into a series of melodic bleeps and bloops recognizable as music. Ron Hubbard was one of these. And to clear the air ? generally speaking we weren't talking about writing code, as in syntax of a programming language ? we are talking about miles of machine language code the would get sent from the game to the sound hardware. Yah...
The early years of game sound, or computer sound for that matter were almost the dark ages of digital audio. We are spoiled today with high quality DAW's and further ? middleware applications like Wwise and Fmod which we can use to not only add sound, but Implement it as well ? not just when to play it, but how to play it. In the dark ages ? it was a matter of code, and code alone. For this reason, generally the sound team was just the code team wearing another hat. It wasn't until years later, trackers (Goattracker, etc) were developed allowing people to actually use a musical note when talking to hardware about sound. The sad state of affairs is that even with all of the new fancy toys that we have in today's game dev market ? we still see a lot of production teams letting games loose upon the masses with, less then savory audio. Lets take a look at a couple examples.
But first ? as a disclaimer ? I do not look down on any of the following developers, nor do I feel people are lazy when they don't apply a ton of effort into sound. It takes a lot of manpower to make a game, and in the end ? the entire team, sound included (arguably, especially sound), are victims of the deadline. In fact, when discussing Far Cry 2 with a previous employee of EA Canada/dear friend of mine ? he pointed out that it was probably just a bug ? they ran out of time come the final milestones. For the record ? I understand this happens, but in the end ? such a bug has obviously helped formed an opinion on a shipped product which I own, and play. An audience is an audience, and it judges based on performance, end of story. Similarily this article isn't meant to bash the heavywieght developers, the truth is most games ship incomplete because thats what the deadline requires.
Anyways, on with it:
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