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| 10/6/99 |
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Sound.
It may seem odd that an art guy is yapping about sound and music but bear with me. Interplay's sound department is probably the most taken for granted of all departments. I don't envy Charles Deenan or his fine crew. Imagine a game the size of Torment (or Baldur's Gate) and think of all the sounds that have to be produced for such an endeavor. Now imagine how the sound department is probably one of the last people to get their hands on the product. They basically get finished movies, location art, character and spell animations, and a big, fat immovable deadline. I went over to our sound department last week and saw what they were up to. It was pretty impressive. All the sounds in the game; monsters, locations, movies, characters, everything is processed there for this game. I'm not sure it's all created in-house (that would be staggering) but I'm pretty sure that all sounds get filtered through our sound department. As an example of our sound assignment process, the sound department usually sits down with one of the designers or artists and watches us pantomime a movie scene with spit flying out of our mouth while we make our sounds, wave our hands and roll our eyes. Then we pull out the soundtrack to some movie we really like and howl how the battle music should "be just like the Raiders theme but a little different." HAHAHA Better yet, we make a bunch of clawing motions with our hands and growl a little and say, "Yeah, just like from Aliens, but more chittery!" You get the idea. A friend of mine once said whenever sound is done well you don't notice but when sound is done bad it's one of the first things you notice. I don't know how true that is but I see the point. I will say that about 96 percent of what I've heard for our game hasn't even registered because it just seems natural and correct because of our sound department.
Tim |