Video Game Sounds Explained By Experts

(various video game noises play)

(low beeps)

Pong! The first video game.

In those days, the programmers created the sounds.

I think they wanted to create an audience and cheers,

and at the end of it,

they were just left with a tone.

Definitely limited to the waveforms they could make.

They didn't have samples,

so they had a chip that made sounds.

They could only get up to a certain pitch

because that took some horsepower

away from the rest of the game.

People have probably heard that sound

tens of thousands of times,

and it's one little tone.

Amazing.

(rings and beeps)

It's almost like a planned demolition,

but there's also a bit of what we call party

at the beginning of it.

There's the (mimics beeping).

The GameBoy had four channels of audio.

It was even limited compared to the bigger consoles.

Three of them were just,

they're called PSG sounds.

Like a bleep or a bloop.

But again, they had an oscillator,

maybe they could do FM,

it could do a little bit of modulation.

The fourth channel was what's called white noise,

so that was just like a (imitates static).

If you made it really low, (imitates explosion)

it sounded like an explosion.

(high ringing)

It's the sound of progress.

Sound can often be just the perfect tool

to reassure you that you've accomplished something.

If we feel like you've failed, we use dissonance.

So, when you listen to something consonant,

it actually has sympathetic vibrations.

You kinda start low, and go high.

It's a psychology of giving you that (happy vocalization).

Finish him!

This is like government, burning books,

and showing Elvis from the waist-up.

This is like the video game equivalent of that.

It gets the testosterone going.

It's battles, Mortal Kombat.

It brought the quieter parts and it made them louder,

brought the louder parts and it made them quieter,

and they brought the volume up to that.

So the basically,

they compressed the dynamic range of the sound.

And then they added a bit of reverb on it,

but I think that the most convincing portion of this

is the performance.

And I think that's something that

we don't have an affect for yet,

and I don't think we ever will.

(suspenseful music)

(triumphant fanfare)

That's like a ten second long clip.

That is an eternity in games.

The camera lusts over this box.

Build it up, build it up!

And spins around.

Build it up, build it up!

And gives all the time that's needed.

Build it up, pause.

To be able to create that level of anticipation.

And then the payoff.

And you got a map.

(rolling)

(sudden orchestral note)

(rolling and grinding)

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater,

a game that I had the fortunate privilege to work on.

It's kinda hyper-reality.

From your perspective, it may not sound that way,

but maybe we put a mic at the bottom of the wheels.

In my backyard, I had concrete, I had stone, I had brick,

and I don't know how to skateboard.

I fell off the skateboard literally hundreds of times.

I still have the scar,

I don't know if you can see that right there.

And so when you fall of the board,

and you hear the (grunts of pain),

that's me actually falling off the board.

(punches, explosion)

When it comes to punches,

the important thing is the randomization.

Two pieces of wood.

Whack!

I take a belt, snap it.

A flat bat, whack the crap out of like a hanging rug.

Or a whip, and hit something.

You get that kind of crack.

Watermelon, bash the (bleep) out of it like with a hammer.

To get the whoosh in,

I actually shot arrows into a turkey.

Get bones and crack 'em.

And then I took a mallet and a frozen turkey and hit it.

To replicate the blood and the flesh.

It's not unusual for us to either go with a sound

or to put six, seven sounds together to make up one punch.

(multiple bullets shot in rapid succession)

I love the sound of those guns.

There was definitely a philosophy

in the design of Overwatch which we called play by sound.

When you're getting towards the end there's a beep

that enforces you that you're about to run out of ammo.

You should be able to close your eyes

and know exactly what's around you,

how close danger is, where your teammates are.

Someone's to my right, I hear her on the right speaker,

(whistles) I'm flipping to the right.

I mean, there are people

who are legally blind who are playing the game,

and playing it successfully.

(crew members applauding) Cool.

You ever sit on a sandbag for two hours?

The complexity that goes into games

are no longer simple.

If there was one piece of advice

I can give a starting sound designer,

record everything you can.

It takes months, if not a year,

to do the sound for a game.

The best sound for something could be

just at a moment's notice,

you have to be ready.