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Choosing Wisely So what should we do? What sounds should we make? It all depends on the game. It always comes back to that. If the game needs to sound like a war zone, it's not going gracefully into many street locations, so don't worry about trying to sound like CNN's version of Desert Storm; Apocalypse Now or Saving Private Ryan are much better models. If we have the opportunity to make our game sound like a TV or radio broadcast, however, we give our game the chance to be audible in a street location. The constraints we face in both types of game environments lead us to question the value of anything that isn't near the top of the volume curve. We can't afford a lack of clarity in the soundtrack, so whatever we want to stand out must be free of competition from anything that lives in the background. The easiest way to accomplish this is to severely limit the amount of background material. Ambience tracks, in general, need to be so quiet relative to foreground sounds that they'll just get lost in a coin-op environment. This is not true of background music since, culturally, music carries a foreground message (i.e. people often listen to music as a foreground pastime), and this allows music to live higher up in an interactive mix than an ambience track. But we can compose hot music that leaves lots of space for foreground events; indeed, how successful we are at this largely determines how graceful our overall soundtrack can be. A great tool to have at our disposal is a mechanism to "duck" the volume of various elements when something more important comes up, then restore the volume after the foreground event has passed. This allows us to keep the level of the background music fairly high, without threatening to hide foreground elements when they appear. We must be aware, though, that the more things we have to duck, the more complicated the restore operation becomes; further, a subsequent event might end up ducking both the background and any other foreground sounds that might already be running. The moral of the story: the fewer things we have going on at any given time, the cleaner our soundtrack will be and the greater will be our audience's chance of hearing that soundtrack. Non-video coin-op: Pinball and Redemption Games Redemption games are games that pay out tickets for successfully performing some simple act, such as rolling a coin down a track at just the right moment to coincide with a particular light lighting up, or throwing a skee-ball into a particular hole, or stopping a light cycle at just the right place (a la roulette wheels). In each case, the game spits out a variable number of tickets depending on how well the player did; the player then redeems the tickets for small prizes such as stuffed animals. These games are wildly popular in kids' arcades and at amusement parks; they traditionally earn two to three times as much as a video game in a similar location. Even after the operator pays for the prizes, the profit margin on these machines is impressive compared with other coin-op devices. There are three things to mention regarding sound for redemption games. The first is that we almost never see them in street locations; the prize inventory takes up too much room, and in general we frown on sending little kids into bars. So the problems of game sound in a street location don't really apply here: these games are almost all in arcades, so we only need to make sure that our redemption soundtrack is heard by our players clearly. The second point is that redemption games tend to define simplicity of game play. The player does exactly the same thing, over and over; the result of his actions may produce three, five or, at the most, ten different results. There is no specific "start of game" or detailed "object of the game" beyond the simple act of dropping a coin, throwing a single ball or pressing a button. The game starts when the player performs the action; the game is over when the result is known and the tickets are awarded. That' s it. So our soundtrack, in general, consists of an action sound, a small number of reward sounds, and maybe a ticket spitting sound. We can do the entire job in a few hours, usually, and the beauty of it is we can make every sound the same volume (as loud as possible); the operators will turn us up loud enough to be heard, and our problem of clarity doesn't really exist. The third point is that redemption games are designed for young kids, say ages 4 through maybe 11 or 12. Whether this is what the kids want, the customers for these machines (the operators) prefer the soundtracks to be upbeat and happy, like the color scheme of the game and cabinet art. Cute arpeggios and fanfares, cartoony swoops & boinks, tend to be where we end up on these projects. We don't use speech much; the games are too repetitive. Pinball, or its predecessor Pachinko, is probably the original coin-op amusement game. It is a tribute to its spectacular basic game mechanic that the game is still manufactured 66 years after its invention. This basic idea (slanted board, two coil-actuated flippers at the bottom, some sort of plunger to put the ball back in play), which underwent very little outward change for the first 40 years or so, was augmented in recent years in two main ways: 1) the increasingly complex mechanisms into, around and through which the ball could be shot; and 2) the increasingly rich and complex sound system available for a relatively small increase in cost. Both of these developments, both of which were made possible by the digital revolution, led to increasingly complex sets of game rules being grafted onto the same basic play mechanic. Underneath all the new toys, the basic game was the same, and visually the amount of information didn't change much; we were still presented with a more-or-less static backbox painting, with static art drawn on a playfield embedded with blinking lights & flashers. The lights could go on and off to direct the player to make this or that shot, but in order to attach those shots to a theme, sound was increasingly relied on to carry the rules to the player, to reward the player for achieving the object of the game, and most importantly, to bring the theme of the game to life. In the last ten years or so pinball soundtracks have come to resemble nothing so much as interactive radio plays. The challenge of designing such soundtracks in the arcade context is formidable; the game requires a compelling background track to carry the basic style or theme of the game, and that track has to be louder than we would like relative to the sound effects and speech cues. All the techniques we discussed above regarding arcade sound must be brought to bear on this problem. The result, if done well, is tremendously rewarding; the fact that we're not tied to a particular picture allows us unparalleled freedom in designing set pieces and reward sequences, and pinball sound designers over the year have responded to this freedom by producing some of the most wonderful (if not always wacky) soundtracks ever heard in any game. The Indispensable Element? Sound doesn't get the respect it deserves from coin-op management. Unlike home game developers, coin-op developers can with some legitimacy claim that "they just turn it down anyway." Incidentally, they continue to claim this today even in the face of a 1991 market survey of coin-op operators, whose number one request for improvement was "more and better sound!" How can we gain the respect we need to continue to innovate? First of all, we must be able to refute the argument that "they just turn it down anyway." We know that a street location employee will get a game turned down that he or she doesn't want to listen to. We must do everything we can to create soundtracks for street games that those employees won't want to turn down. We do this, as we discussed above, by incorporating elements that sound as if they belong in the environment, and by providing as wide a variety of sound as possible for each repetitive thing the player does. We should only have to jump through this hoop if we're working on street pieces. If a game is targeted for the arcade, we should be able to point out to recalcitrant management that we'll be laughed out of an arcade if our sound is turned down; that arcade operators rely on sound to attract players to a game; and that if they really believe that no one turns the sound up, they should simply take the sound hardware off the bill of materials and eliminate the sound from the development schedule entirely. This last sentence usually is sufficient to call management's bluff. The ultimate way to refute this argument lies in remembering that the distaste for coin-op game sound was born in the 70's, with games that could only make beeps and boops. The fact that we can now incorporate recorded sound into soundtracks, and that we can vary the playback of those recordings in meaningful ways, means that we have the capability to sound much less out of place than these early efforts sounded. The short retort to the argument is, "They don't turn it as far down, as often, as you once thought." And we must follow through on this position and provide soundtracks that don't get turned down. Two final thoughts: First, the single most dramatic improvement in the sound of a coin-op game would come from doubling the amount of money spent on speakers and amplifiers. A more powerful amp that avoids clipping distortion at higher volumes, coupled with more efficient transducers, will do more to warm up an electronic playback device than all the compression technology, all the interactive soundtrack technology, all the multiple voices, that we could (and would like to) throw at a coin-op game. If we play back a natural recorded sound cleanly, it will sound pretty much like what it is and be recognized as such. If that playback is clipped, the sound will be perceived as "electronic." Finally: Our best friend in the industry is the game programmer responsible for putting sounds in the game. If that programmer likes sound and music, has a good sense of rhythm and timing, is given ample time to implement sound, and if we join with that programmer in giving our undivided attention to the implementation process, our game will sound better than even we thought it could. Chris Granner studied composition and computer/electronic music at the University of Illinois, and computer programming at several jobs before joining Williams Electronics (now Midway Manufacturing) in 1986 as composer/sound programmer. He has composed music & designed soundtracks for about forty arcade titles, including Terminator II, Fish Tales, WWF Wrestlemania, Trog, and The Addams Family. He is currently the director of the audio group at Incredible Technologies. He can be reached at cgreanner@itsgames.com. _________________________________________________ |
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