Tales from the Trenches of Coin-Op Audio

Editor's note: This paper was originally published in the 1999 Game Developer's Conference proceedings.

Contents

The Object of the Game Follow the Money Choosing Wisely

Sound for a coin-op game has a great deal in common with sound for a home game or a console game. Regardless of target system or environment, sound takes a flat picture on a video screen and brings it to life in the player's world. No other game element immerses the player like sound does. (Just ask any sound designer!)

The main thing coin-op sound has in common with home game sound is that in either case, the presentation of sound, and the development of that presentation, takes a back seat to the play of the game itself. This is as it should be; we might want to be selling records, but the folks paying the bills are trying to sell games, and we're supposed to be helping them do that.

The world of coin-op game sound, however, is dramatically distinct from the world of game sound as it exists in the home or office. The most fundamental difference is in the way players pay for a coin-op game (50 cents or a dollar per play, versus 50 bucks up front for a home game). The kind of game that succeeds in a coin-op environment has a gratification curve that must be much less steep than for a home game, and the coin-op soundtrack must help to sell and enhance that gratification.

Combined with the need to support "instant" gratification is the fact that coin-op games are played in public places, and in many (most!) of those places the kind and amount of noise tolerated from a coin-op device is extensively restricted. In the case where "anything goes," the arcade or game room, the problem is that all the machines in the room are making a lot of noise, creating a din which dramatically reduces the effective signal-to-noise ratio of a soundtrack.

In this rather hostile environment, the sound designer must "choose wisely" which sound elements to emphasize. Elements that would provide a delicate or "deep" background or ambience behind foreground sound elements will be lost either to having the game turned almost all the way down, or to a public version of stereo wars.

These problems confront the sound designer of any type of coin-op game. Although we're mostly concerned with video games, we face many of the same problems creating soundtracks for pinball & redemption games. However, the nature of these devices is fundamentally different from a video game in ways that affect the soundtrack; we will examine these differences briefly.

The most formidable challenge to sound designers of coin-op games is the sentence "They just turn them down anyway." Knowing when and how people started to say such things makes it possible for the sound designer to fight against this extremely demoralizing argument. This battle is fought on the battleground of audibility: by enhancing the effective audibility of our soundtracks, we enhance the importance of sound design to the entire project. So we have to improve at making "indispensable sound."

The Object of the Game

The idea is to enhance gameplay. This is true for any game soundtrack, whether coin-op, PC or console. Here are some thoughts about how to be effective in this context, whichever platform or environment we're designing for.

We're artists. We want to be recognized as such. We leave a piece of ourselves in every sound we make (or should anyway). We understand sound and hear sound on a level that's beyond what we can expect from most listeners. We sweat the details.

We can't allow this concern for the minutiae of audio to get in the way of gameplay. We must simply pick our spots. There are many points in every game where a set piece or little movie is presented that the player is just supposed to watch. During these moments is when it's appropriate to milk the subtlety. But keep in mind that the player can "tap" out of such moments in most games. So our awesome movie soundtrack will be interrupted by some joe with a joystick. The joe pays the bills, however…so if he want to go on, let's let him and not fret his lost opportunity to hear our magnum opus. The moral: we can still do great work in a supporting role; we don't have to be the stars.

Speaking of awesome - since we're working in an interactive medium, the final audio result is somewhat indeterminate, which makes it difficult to compose and shape long passages predictably. But the following rule of thumb is applicable: a graceful large shape is made up of lots of graceful small shapes. So even the smallest foley element needs to have color, profile, and character. This is the best way to insure that the indeterminate result sounds as good as we can make it. This does NOT mean that every element needs to be as loud as possible. There are other reasons we want to make everything as loud as possible which we'll explore presently.

The size of a game soundtrack project, in terms of man-hours, is dwarfed by the size of the game development itself. This means that, if we're involved with a game project from the beginning, we'll be placing elements into the game that the developers, and especially the programmers, are going to be listening to from now 'till the end of the project. At the very least, we run the risk that they'll get sick of something. More insidious is the creep in intensity; the new death blow must be bigger, louder, more intense than the others. It is the job of the sound designer to balance these requests in such a way as to keep the developers happy. In a strange sense, the soundtrack represents the mood of the project, and this places the sound designer in the unenviable role of Master of Attitude Adjustment. The best way to serve this purpose is to bring in new stuff regularly. This minimizes the chance of the whole soundtrack becoming stale.

Our reality is that we're making interactive games. We're working as part of a team of designers, programmers and artists to produce a comprehensive interactive experience - emphasis on "interactive." We must find a way, as sound artists, to put heart and soul into a piece of this larger opus, and to make that piece (the soundtrack) do all it can to help the game reach the player, so the player hears, feels and understands the world he's being immersed in. It's not the same as reaching a listener directly with a piece of music or a great solo. But it's tremendously rewarding to read in a review something like "there's a great moment when you pick the lock - the door opens with a grinding snarl, it slams against the doorstop like a kick in your gut, and you feel the door shiver right up & down your spine."

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Follow the Money