[...]... favorite video game stars and sales of video game soundtracks continue to top the charts, driving a whole other aspect to the industry The fame and glory of being a recording artist is quite well known to us in the United States and game score composers and musicians are standing poised to take advantage of this type of notoriety too We don’t share the spotlight with “name brand” artists and we don’t... help set the stage Some form of surround sound will likely become prevalent; Dolby Digital, DTS, or perhaps another unknown format, with multiple audio channels intended to envelope a player into the experience There is much in the works to make this a reality — deciding on a standard; getting the hardware designers, game developers, composers, and sound creators all on board; and getting the game player... inspiration for computer entrepreneurs everywhere, but there aren’t many game audio professionals who lead the road for future generations The Complete Guide to Game Audio serves as that role model for game audio and is a great resource for anyone looking to enter this fascinating industry New and old engineers alike will find this book as a strong reference tool to understand the boundaries of the interactive... behind And it is only obvious that game audio will be right there to take advantage of it all The DVD format, with storage space of 4.8 gb, appears to be on the road to replace the CD With this, all audio will be at least 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo And as audio technology grows to a standard of 96 kHz, 24-bit, surround, there will be room to accommodate The sound quality will be incredible, right there in the. .. limited audio fidelity and kept the resolution of sound to a minimum In recent years, there has been a strong effort to enhance sound for games, and next generation systems and speakers have made great strides to address memory and bandwidth for audio Dolby encoding, DVD drives, surround sound speakers, and increased memory have given sound professionals a new field to play on One fascinating aspect about the. .. Spiderman 2, Draconus, X-Men2 and many, many others The Industr y Now The games industry can be a very exciting and dynamic place for musicians and sound designers Through sound and music, a game can completely immerse a player in another universe or reality The creative freedom to manipulate moods and environments is limited only by the technical capabilities of the machine and a musician’s imagination... internal memory and triggered by standard sequenced data This idea has been used in cartridge games with much success to enable a game to have its own audio personality, instead of using the exact sounds every other game is using The beauty of this is that composers and sound designers can pick and choose their own sounds instead of being stuck with what the sound card manufacturer has installed The developer... coin-op game consoles vying for your attention Search the internet for online Shockwave Flash and Java games You’ll never find them all! Are you getting the picture yet? The game industry is HUGE and there is always work for those who are good enough, persistent enough, and lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time 1.6 The Rewards Providing audio for games can be a unique challenge and sometimes... enhance the sound Java and Shockwave Flash games are designed to load quickly and the smaller the sound file, the better Some Web game designers opt to leave out audio all together or reuse one or two sounds for everything — reminding me of the early days of video game design Keep an eye on the broadband wave, and as it becomes faster, audio quality will follow the same path 6 — CHAPTER 1: A n I n t r... and the occasional symphony orchestra to boot There are very busy composers out there who earn $50–60,000 for an hour or hour and a half’s worth of music per game and some of them do up to 30 games a year! Do the math; there is some serious cash potential And that isn’t even all of it — there is also: • earnings from royalties and soundtrack releases, • fees for the same music on different game platforms . the road for future generations. The Complete Guide to Game Audio serves as that role model for game audio and is a great resource for anyone looking to enter this fascinating industry. New and.