![]() ![]() This feels culturally related to how it is getting easier to celebrate games for being games. So, inter-disciplinary collaboration is the key to making progress here and, as an industry, we now better recognise the importance of this, so on our current trajectory I think we're going to see more and more experiences emerging that are comfortable using sound and music in ways which are unique to our medium rather than essentially just aping how it is used in linear media. People are always hungry for new experiences and audio is relatively untapped, so let's go, right?!īut audio is hard to exploit, for all the reasons I touched on earlier - it can be mercurial and hard to grasp for folks that aren't specialists. Going back to the notion of games being a broad church - there's room for everything under the sun and a growing audience to support it. Or, at least, I hope so! There's so much unexplored territory here, we've barely scratched the surface. So, we're in a much better place now, and I look upon the eerily similar contemporary conversations surrounding younger crafts such as narrative design or community management with a wry smile and look forward to seeing how that progresses over the next decade.Ībsolutely. You can't have one without the other! Having said that, as audio experiences in games have become more sophisticated, experienced developers have become more aware of the potential for audio to contribute in a meaningful way towards the player experience, and audio professionals have also become better at engaging, collaborating and inspiring their colleagues in other disciplines. I've come to appreciate and accept that an element of that is inevitable and actually desirable - sound and music's superpower is being able to influence people's thoughts, feelings and perceptions on a subconscious level, and it is precisely this mercurial, intangible quality which leads to it being underappreciated. When I got into the industry audio was always jokingly referred to as the "bastard stepchild" of game development, because it was easily overlooked and very much seen as the icing on the development cake rather than one of the main ingredients. I think you can hear the fruits of that in terms of the quality and sophistication, which just keeps on going up, but also in terms of the breadth of different audio experiences and aesthetics on offer - it's really amazing, and perhaps even a little overwhelming at times, to see quite how insanely broad the church of games has become.Īnd then there's the matter of how game development culture, and its relationship with audio, has changed over the same period. Which has been advantageous in many respects, because it means we've been able to spend less time battling the technology and increase the focus on refining it so we can create engaging, immersive audio experiences. But, fundamentally, the basic premise and technology of interactive audio hasn't changed all that much since the PlayStation 1 and 2 eras - we're still just triggering samples and streaming assets off of disk for the most part. Whilst that's down to the peculiarities of that specific project and isn't by any means applicable to all games, that would nonetheless have been totally beyond my comprehension 15 years ago. I'm just throwing sound at the game and haven't hit any limits yet. For example, on my current project (which is for PlayStation 4, PC and Mac), overlooking the fact that we haven't started optimising yet, I've got more memory available to me than I know what to do with. ![]() The truth is, though, that the main change since that time is we now simply have the capacity for more sound and more music in our games. Perhaps not in the mainstream, but there's definitely room for that nostalgic niche within gaming culture. It's interesting, actually - I think perhaps we're still a little too close to that period to look back on those limitations with fondness, but I feel like the 90s aesthetics of the original PlayStation-generation are due a bit of a revisit and revival. Which was challenging, but that just meant you had to get creative whilst also squeezing the life out of everything! But that gave the games a particular, unique sound and aesthetic - a naïve lack of sound, a lot of repetition and an unpleasant grainy quality that you get from low bit-rate, ADPCM audio. When I started out working on PlayStation 2 games (EyeToy: Chat, anyone? I didn't think so.) we were streaming music off of DVDs and were seriously limited with the amount of memory we had to play with for sound samples. KY: Sure! Well, it's always easy to view games from a technology point of view because it changes so fast and that really dates everything. ![]() As you've now entered your 15th year in the games industry we're wondering if you can tell us how audio design and music has evolved through the years? ![]()
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