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| 7/12/99 |
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After a lot of programming and after creating a lot of art, a rather new segment of game development is slowly becoming more important to our project. I am talking about music, sound and voice overs.
We have been toying with various ideas to voice-cast the characters in our game for a long time, and ideas ranged from Chris Rock as Morte all the way to Kiefer Sutherland as the Nameless One. Neither of them actually worked out for a number of reasons. Some because the voice was just not really suitable for the character, although it would have been cool to have the actor in the game, or sometimes because the talent is simply not available or affordable, and sometimes just because of scheduling problems. For the most part we are now using accomplished voice-over actors who have a lot of experience working in the cartoon field and even in the games industry. Fred Hatch, who is responsible for preparing and seeing-through the voice-over recordings, and Chris Border, our extremely talented voice recording guru here at Interplay are currently working together, scheduling recording sessions for various of the people to bring the personalities from the game to life. On the other end of the spectrum we have the music. Brian Williams, the composer we have been able to bring aboard for this project, still hasn't recuperated from the blow I gave him a few weeks ago when we met and I dissected all the pieces he did so far. Seriously though, Brian is currently very busy making all the changes we had decided upon in our meeting, making sure everything goes well with the game. Writing music for computer games is incredibly much harder than writing film scores, if it's done right. Film is a completely linear medium with a quality level that has a common denominator. The composer knows at any time what the viewer is going to see and he can work accordingly to emphasize these images, always using state of the art technology. In computer games things look VERY differently. I have been writing and recording the soundtracks for my past few games and I found out for myself how hard it can be to create these music scores. You need something that is elaborate and yet not repetitive, heroic yet not too obtrusive, or even ambient without washing out with all the overlaying sound effects. Most importantly you always need to write something that is consistent in feel and sound for an entire game. We're not talking 60 minutes of music for a movie, but music for 100 or more hours of gameplay here. Gameplay that constantly changes and takes on different forms. Gameplay that is completely unpredictable and can force the music to change from one piece to another without abridging. It is a challenge all by itself to come up with enough material to colorfully cover an entire game, but to make sure it can be spliced into pieces that can then be modulated into each other can easily become a nightmare. The good thing about it is that as a composer, you will be able to pick up the final game and start playing, and all of a sudden your music takes on a life of its own. The game creates music on-the-fly and all of a sudden pieces are played in sequence that you never thought would work, and yet, they create an intriguing layer of music that enhances the game. I have all the faith in the world that Brian Williams will present a soundtrack for Torment that will not only match the atmosphere and feel of the game quite well, but through his very individual style, he will add something very special to the game, something you can't buy off the shelf. It is called talent. Have a great week everyone.
Guido Henkel |
| Planescape: Torment & Design: © 1998 Interplay Productions. All Rights Reserved. © 1998 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Planescape, the Planescape logo, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Torment, the AD&D logo, and the TSR logo are trademarks of TSR, Inc. and are used by Interplay under license. TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Interplay, the Interplay logo, Black Isle Studios and the Black Isle Studios logo are trademarks of Interplay Productions. Exclusively licensed and distributed by Interplay Productions. All other trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners. |