Club Silicon

The rise and fall of game audio

A lame attempt to link / ripoff / "use" other works as the "meat and potatoes" of my own site? I think not. This article has heart and I'd be an utter fool not to link it here. My only correction to its title would be "the rise and fall of game music". It doesn't address VO and sfx.

On The Fatman's site, his explanation is even shorter than mine: "just read it". 'Nuff said.

http://www.armchairarcade.com/aamain/content.php?article.48

You just can't ignore this

First, thanks to Darth Mandarb who uploaded this art to Pixel Joint.

No matter who you are, you have to live somewhere. The street, an apartment, a hostel, a house, etc.. I'm sure a lot of people both here in the USA and overseas have been reading about the financial crisis brought about by people not being able to pay their mortages and financial companies going under who guaranteed those mortgages.

So today I looked at house prices in Irvine. That's Orange County, California. A 3 bedroom, 2 bath house (attached, average single family size) goes minimum for $400,000. No yard to speak of but 1500 square feet. And on Realtor.com there are about 430 such houses available. Granted, Irvine has a population of around 180,000 compared to Austin's 2 million.

Now we look at Austin, Texas. Over 4,000 houses available, and an equivalent house with about the same features and a corner lot goes for $90,000. Amazing, isn't it? Sorry, but humidity and not having a beach doesn't jack up the price four and a half times, ESPECIALLY if people can't afford it.

Just what crack are people smoking in SoCal? I did take economics. I studied the basics of supply and demand. But this isn't a natural case of supply and demand. Realtors and builders are jacking up prices in California because they believe people will still pay for them. The truth is they're not anymore. They can't. Four years ago I read that only 10% of the people moving into San Diego could afford a house. How can you stay in business? Only two ways: lower housing costs, or keep the prices the same or higher and hope the few that you DO sell will keep your own bills paid. With the financial crisis that's taking place stemming from overpriced housing in the first place, you'd think that would change in California. Nope. Greed wins.

I really hope something is done about this in our country. I'm ashamed of this sort of wanton greed. All I can do to change it is not buy a house. And if prices stay like this in Cali, I never will.

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

My wife was generous enough to let me play one of my birthday presents early. The final chapter in the Metroid Prime series: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Bless that Austin developer Retro for yet another very worthy Metroid title.

I confess, I've left a few still popular Nintendo "sure and steady" series' behind such as Zelda. But I'm still going strong in Castlevania, and I believe I've played every single Metroid game out there. Definitely haven't won them all (Fusion was a BITCH!), but it is the one series along with Half Life that hasn't let me down.

An ode to pro audio

Life was simple back in the days of the Ad Lib soundcard. I thank my lucky stars each day that I was able to progress from such humble beginnings as writing music on an OPL chipset, but then a lot of people got their start in humble ways, whether it be strumming a guitar, singing, or saving every dollar from a guitar playing stint with Frank Zappa to build a small studio to record "Passion and Warfare".

Musicians and audio folk in general learn new things each day. On Friday I taught Fryda (Obsidian's technical sound designer) how to use delay rather than reverb to achieve a slap back effect for some voices on the deck of a masted vessel in one of our games. She used Waves Supertap 2 with some tweaking to achieve it and the game sounds 1% cooler. I'll take 1% in 5 minutes of fiddling any day.

But these lessons are constant and some of them aren't learned easily. In this new series "ode to pro audio" I intend to examine some of those unanswered questions.

What's the difference?

These days I'm studying small format consoles.

Where game dev begins...

 

This is a recording of Jason Emery and Alex Brandon, roughly 1991 or so, at Alex's parents' house in Annapolis, Maryland. On the PC one of us is creating an adventure / RPG using Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set. The other is playing Mega Man 3. We switch not long after the recording begins.

This was the fuel for the fire that became our careers. I'm sure many of you have had similar experiences, from games to attempting to create them (as we clumsily were in this recording). Let posterity make its own judgements, and there's even a little humor in here. Enjoy this little slice of life.

Download JasonandAlecMegaMan.mp3

What's Happening?

Yet another long overdue update, dear readers.

Obsidian

My being overloaded with work is a given, but first to ship soon will be the next expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir. While I don't want to give anything away before it is actually out I can say it has a killer soundtrack, with some hard work by both myself and the designers to implement it. Soon we should see some things trickling out of marketing with appropriate announcements. I also have the honor of voicing Volothamp Geddarm, a fairly well known character in the Forgotten Realms, as well as writing two of the game's pieces of music and the odd sound effect.

One thing I can tell you is that the toolset we're using to create these games is so limiting I'm amazed that we're still making competitive products with them. We have programmers who work wonders within their tangled mass of antiquated code, but things are still pretty old school. So for any of you who buy this, remember its based on a code base and audio implementation scheme that was started more than six years ago. Beat THAT.