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The Object of the Game Follow the Money Choosing Wisely

Follow the Money

All the preceding is applicable to sound design in general; let's focus now on some of the challenges characteristic of coin-op sound design. These characteristics can be traced to the way players pay for coin-op games. Players buy PC or console games at a store for anywhere from $20 to $90, making the entire outlay at once. Coin-op players pay by the game, 50 cents or a buck per game. This difference, although obvious, cannot be overstated.

The player with the home game under her arm has made an investment. She's now going to take it home and do everything she can to make that investment pay off. She'll install it and run it right away; she'll watch the now-obligatory introductory movies; she'll dig into the documentation or go online to find the solution to any problems she has with the install, or how to run it; she'll experiment with the controls; she'll forgive overly easy or boring stuff at the beginning if she finds cooler stuff at deeper levels; she'll literally spend hours doing anything she can to make that investment pay off in quality diversion & amusement because she's already made the whole investment. She has a fair amount to lose if the investment doesn't pay off, so she's willing to put in some time to maximize her chances of a good payoff.

The coin-op player makes that investment 2 quarters at a time. In most circumstances, whether he wins or loses, he'll be asked to invest another 2 quarters in about 3 minutes. So at the end of 3 minutes he has to evaluate whether this game is worth an additional investment. This means that he game has 3 minutes to seduce him. Put another way, the game must allow the player to feel sufficiently successful, to "obtain the amusement dividend," within the span of 3 minutes.

This requirement (3 minutes of gratification) eliminates many types of games from contenders to coin-op success. Your strategy game, your mystery adventure - forget it. In fact, anything that wants to move at a slow pace has a pretty poor record in a coin-op context. The games that have succeeded in the last several years, while spanning a pretty broad spectrum of styles, all have in common a large does of in-your-face adrenaline-based feedback. This, as we may have guessed, is where sound design comes in.

Save the dreamy noir music tracks and ballads for the game over screens. Our music will probably all end up running at ¼-note equals 120 or higher (even if we don't start there). As we discover later, if we can make our music feel fast and hot with long notes and lots of space, we'll be doing ourselves a favor; but it has to be hot, hot, hot!

Sound effects must literally explode. Our motto: Bigger than life isn't big enough. We want the player rocked back on his heels going "whoa!" as often as possible. This requirement steers us in the direction of things that have a very short attack time - even for things that don't in real life, like swooshes & yells. We are not so concerned with reality here; like the movies, powerful and compelling wins over accurate every time. In addition, each sound the player hears might be the last one he hears for a few seconds. So make sure each sound has a graceful ending. This is how we create graceful passages in an indeterminate sound context: make sure everything that happens is graceful.

Speech scripts for a coin-op game tend toward the apoplectic. Even when it's a quit moment, like putting in a golf game, the announcer has to have an expectant, "up-energy" urgency in his or her whisper. Urgency is the watchword, since the situation is urgent: we have 3 minutes!

Noise in a Public Place

There are obviously a lot of different kinds of public places, but for the purpose of this discussion, we can reduce our analysis to two types: the arcade or game room, and the "street location:" i.e. any other place we're likely to encounter a coin-op game. This includes bars, convenience stores, restaurant waiting areas, movie theater lobbies and laundromats; there are probably a few others but that list gives the proper flavor. What all of these locations have in common is that a coin-op game has been placed in a space that wasn't originally designed for games.

Since it is our first priority to animate what the player is doing, and since what the player of coin-op games is doing is largely the same as what he was doing one second ago, a primary characteristic of the coin-op sound experience could be classified as "repetitive." Many peoples' first experience with video game sounds came from Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders or Asteroids. "Beep" and "Boop" does not much understate the sophistication of these early coin-op sound efforts. If we put ourselves in the position of the people employed in such places, listening to repetitive beeps & boops, we can begin to appreciate the difficulties we continue to face today when we place a game in a street location.

The biggest problem with game sound in these locations is that the sounds they make, by and large, don't sound like they belong in this environment. Beep & boop don't s