[NewMusic] game soundtracks

[Travis Johns]

just paying attention to the post about now - forgive me if i've
missed anything... and, uh, happy holidays and all that.

ala soundtracks, are we talking just the game music, or also the sound
design, etcetc as well? toss that crap in and 100 hours of
superhypercompressed audio seems totally possible - especially with
them thar modern games that require a pilot's license and a 300 page
user's manual just to get your little halfling to go and buy some
manna, or whatever the hell video game characters use for money these
days... admittedly, my video game experience is slightly limited - i
played a final fantasy game once... it took an entire summer to
wrangle and the 4th disc was so scratched that it glitched out right
before the final boss/devil thing... after that i turned the
playstation off, threw it in the closet and it's been collecting dust
there ever since... ok, that's a lie - 2 summers ago i had a brief ms.
pacman fixation, but only in the context of hustling high scores for
rounds of drinks at various artsy-type gatherings in faux/seedy
bars...

...tangent, whoopsy. sound design, right. from my extremely limited
experiences with video game sound design, (uhhhh, considering who all
on this list is actually involved in said medium, y'all might be able
to answer this query waaaaay more accurately than i can...) it seems
that most viddyames run on scripts that provide a couple diff sounds
for your critter to make for each interaction. granted, a lot of these
sounds probably overlap a bit, but if you assume that each interaction
can produce, say, four different possible sounds ranging from half a
second to oh, 2 minutes or so in length and a game takes anywhere from
10 hours to one summer to complete, the likelihood that one of these
mind-rotting time-killers could contain 100 hours of audio is entirely
plausible, ja?

next question: (remember to completely fill in your answer in the
appropriate bubble using ONLY a number 2 pencil...). A train leaves
chicago traveling at 60 miles per hour. At the same time, another
train leaves boston traveling at 75 miles per hour. Given this
information, how long will it take for some contemporary musician to
make a sarcastic comment about this post?

ready class? begin!

(t)

ok, just read jon's post that preceded matt's - the one time i got
paid to make sounds for a video game, i was paid on an hourly rate
with snacks included from the critter who was in turn contracted to
actually make the sounds for said game. upon payment, i had to sign a
couple forms saying that i wouldn't ask for royalties regardless of
how my voice, etc was used and that upon said payment, my contract was
completed and that asking for more money would be a silly idea at
best, etc etc etc... oh, and that i couldn't use said recorded sounds
for anything else... not even experimental psychoacoustic tae pieces
(::sigh::). the game went on to become one of the biggest selling
games of the 2006 holiday season, grossing billions of dollars for the
company that publishes said game, of which less than $200 went towards
the payment of yours truly. welcome to the entry level, kids. eh, its
still better than taking on a craigslist film sound gig where your
countless hours of work goes completely unpaid and the "major industry
exposure" you were promised amounts to a student film festival  at uc
santa cruz or something... thankfully, i've yet to stoop that low...
lets just hope that yet isnt the key word here...


On Dec 28, 2007 4:18 PM, Matt Davignon <mattdavignon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Currently, I don't think it's possible to include 100 hours of music
> in a game. Some role playing games take about 40-50 hours to complete.
> I think the average 'action/adventure' games now take about 10-15
> hours to finish.
>
> Some of the best in-game music I've heard was from the Tomb Raider
> series. The music in that game was lots of very short pieces, ranging
> from a few seconds to about 2 minutes, with several variations on
> similar themes. When playing the game you heard mostly silence and
> ambient sound. The music would pop in if you discovered something, if
> something came after you, or if you walked into a new environment.
>
> The standard game soundtrack for the last 10 years or so is to have a
> number of songs for each stage of the game. Usually the tracks loop
> after about 2 or 3 minutes, sometimes with a 'seamless' repeat so it
> sounds like the song never ends. As you can imagine, it gets painfully
> repetitive more often than not.
>
> Matt
>
> On Dec 28, 2007 1:43 PM, Sarah - 21 Grand <21grand at 21grand.org> was like:
>
> > Jon Raskin was all:
> > Barry, how many musicians are employed to create the 100 hours of music on a
> > game?  What do they get for the effort?  Is it fee based? Are their any
> > royalties available at least at the top end of the industry?
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