The Sound of Gaming
July 30, 2007, by Erlog Here is a scenario, for you, the reader. Imagine loading up your favorite video game and finding that something was somehow…off. You wouldn’t, at first, notice that the game has become significantly more boring. That the game has become harder. But after a while you would notice that it has become slightly more difficult to know whether or not you have gotten a critical hit or just whiffed past your enemy on that last sword swing. The game world feels sterile, vacant, or empty. Your emotions don’t stir in quite the same way as your on-screen puppet grabs that all-important item. You don’t really know whether or not there are enemies lurking ‘round the corner. Now imagine that this is all happening because you have decided to put in earplugs.
That’s right, sound. All of the detriments to the gaming experience that were described above were things that happen when you remove sound. Despite sometimes being treated as such, it is not just a way to spice the experience up. Sound has a legitimate purpose in games. It is a very efficient method of user feedback, and surprisingly, for all the things it does for us while we game, you could call it a recent addition.
Without sound Mario may have found himself seriously ill
Gaming history can be retraced reasonably back to about 1962 when Spacewar was first developed for the PDP-1. At that time, games were a lark to demonstrate the power of computer systems. They were little more than demos running on hardware that wasn’t really designed to handle things like games. So, for the first half of gaming history games didn’t have sound in any significant fashion.
The intense action of... SPACE WAR!!!
In fact, games made before about 1984 had little more than simple tone generators hidden inside of them for providing audio. This gives us the pronounced bleeps and bloops that we so lovingly associate with our early gaming experiences. Hardware was limited to one sound at a time, and music was possible as long as it came from an accompanying record or was extremely slow, short, and appearing only on the title screen. Needless to say, game developers of the time did not employ many musicians.
Unemployed thanks to the gaming industries ZERO demand!
Thankfully, sound of the time I am talking about probably was an icing on the cake feature. There was really no question as to whether or not an event had happened in a game. It was plain as day right there on the screen. But even so, music and sound added unquestionable depth to the experience. The games felt more alive to the people playing them.
And so, things progressed, and they progressed fast. It took 15-20 years to go from no sound at all in Spacewar to the simplistic tone-generated bloops of something like Pac-Man. However, in a similar span of time we’ve gone from NES-style chip music to sound indistinguishable from that of movies.
Ah HELL NAH, I heard you coming
Interestingly, this is why they still sometimes use the old bleep and bloop sounds of old when you see a character playing a videogame in a movie. Games today do not sound like games. They sound like movies, and so it wouldn’t be readily apparent to an older generation of viewers that there was a video game being played. Of course, another reason for this might be that production companies do not want to pay to license to the sound of any particular game. Thankfully for all the gamers in the audience, this has been done away with. Video games are now seen as another instance of product placement.
Back to the topic at hand, I feel that this comparison to movies is an apt one. This is especially the case as graphics get better and better. Gamers will not be content with there being a disparity between the visuals they’re seeing and the sound they are hearing. One of today’s games with tone-generated sound wouldn’t be well-received. High quality visuals need to be accompanied by sound of a similar caliber. Because of all this, sound really is half of the experience and depending on who you ask it could be more.
Hollywood - take notes mm'kay?
Unfortunately, as it sometimes does in film, sound still goes underappreciated in games. Very few gamers are probably aware who created the catchy tunes that bring their beloved game world to life. Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, and Kazumi Totaka are just not household names even though nearly everybody who would describe themselves as a gamer has probably played a game containing their music. Kondo wrote the Mario theme, Nobuo Uematsu has done music for most installments of the Final Fantasy franchise, and Kazumi Totaka’s music is in almost every first-party Nintendo game since 1996 as well as being the voice of Yoshi.
That is really what this is all about, appreciation and understanding. If gaming is to transcend from timewaster to something lofty such as art then we, as gamers, have to really know how far we’ve come. We have to know why this is important. We have to know what we like, and why. Hopefully this article has shed some light on the importance of sound in video games. The background music gets us in the proper mood. The effects give us information that hasn’t been made explicit by the visuals. Sounds give the world personality and ambiance so that we feel like we are there.
Sound is at least half of the modern gaming experience. With surround systems especially, audio technology has surpassed graphics. Modern graphics only allow you to kind of see what’s happening, but sound allows you to be there in a way that won’t be possible with graphics for at least another decade. Let’s all appreciate this.
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