Sound Directors – Scott Morgan, Andy Teal, Rob Bridgett, Roman Tomazin, Ben McCullough
Studio Engineer – Lin Gardiner
Sound Effects Designer – Cory Hawthorne
Composer – Marc Baril
2.What are some of the projects Radical has done in the past, and what current projects are announced?
Radical has worked on lots of games – from ‘The Simpsons Hit And Run’, ‘The Simpsons Road Rage’, ‘The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction’, ‘Scarface: The World Is Yours’, ‘Crash Tag Team Racing’. ‘Crash of the Titans’, to the recently announced and much anticipated ‘Prototype’
3.How many people are in the audio department at Radical?
We have five sound directors, a composer, studio engineer and a sound effects recordist / designer.
4.What sort of equipment do you use in the sound department at Radical?
Each Sound Director is responsible for all the audio on their particular title, from music and dialogue direction to sound effects design, direction and implementation. It is very much down to their own preferences as to what hardware and software is used on that particular game team for the audio. We have people from both Mac backgrounds and from PC backgrounds, and they get on well for the most part ;) MOTU audio interfaces form a pretty strong core of all our systems, as do Genelec monitors. Each sound director has their own sound editing suite; we also have a couple of studios including a VO studio and a newly built 7.1 game mixing suite.
5.How did you decide on Nuendo as your audio platform?
Given the sound team’s deferring backgrounds of both PC and Mac, we needed a platform upon which sessions would be totally cross-compatible between the two. We needed a platform upon which we could run recording sessions in our main studio, or even run as part of a mobile recording rig offsite and with which we could easily open up those sessions on without tedious conversions on either our Mac or PC.
We also needed a system that had all the depth of other post-production focused sequencers and editors, but one which was easy and intuitive enough in its design for us to be comfortable and flexible with its use. We’ve found it great for movie post, sound effects design, movie surround mixing, dialogue recording, multiple mic sound effects recording and some music editing.
6. What features of Nuendo are most essential for your workflow?
Nuendos’ Surround architecture has proved to be second to none. Allowing us to create a session in surround and then have the various mix down options through the suite of surround plugins. Mac PC session compatibility as mentioned before is also really key to the success of Nuendo for us. I’d also like to mention the workflow architecture in Nuendo as being one of the most intuitive that we have worked with. Mention must also go to the easy handling of multiple file types within a session, whether they are stereo, interleaved surround, they can all be easily worked on in a single session.
7. How is game sound design different from other fields of audio production?
With game sound design, usually the sounds have to be able to stand up to a lot of repetition, as they are triggered multiple times throughout the game play, rather than just the once in linear media. What this means is that, as a sound designer, you have to be clever in the way those sound effects are implemented at run-time, either by randomizing the volumes, or pitch of the sound each time it is played back, or creating a group of ‘variants’ for that sound in the game, avoiding repetition is one of the main driving forces behind interactive sound effects design. This can mean spending lots of time, and experimenting with the original sound that is designed in Nuendo, adding and removing layers, trying out that sound in the game, and then often going back to the drawing board with what has been learned from hearing the sound implemented into the game itself. It is often a long process.
Another essential thing that game sound designers have to deal with, and which movie sound designers don’t have to worry about, is the amount of memory that the sound effects themselves take up inside the game. There tends to be around 30 – 40 MB of space for sounds to sit in memory at any one time. This sounds like a lot, but if you imagine filling up that space with mp3s of your favorite music, then you’ll see how quickly that space can run out. There is a heavy amount of technical skill and understanding needed to work out what sounds can be dumped out of memory at any time and what sounds are absolutely essential at particular moments in the game, this is all stuff that happens invisibly to the player when they are hearing the final game.
8. What features would you like to see in future versions of Nuendo, to better optimize it for use in the games industry?
I think that the new MediaBay search engine is great to have in Nuendo4, however it really needs to have database files from the leading commercially available sound effects libraries available to it, so it can import all the search terms from these thousands of discs.
9. Do you use any other Steinberg applications or instruments, such as Cubase or Wavelab?
No
10. Any words of wisdom for people wanting to get into the sound for Video Games?
Right now, I’d say that there seem to be so many musicians and composers trying to get into the games industry, the market really is becoming flooded with composers. If you have a passion for sound effects design, Foley or dialogue then you are more likely to stand out as someone who could fill a realistic role in the games industry.
I’d recommend getting an internship and getting some hands on experience with the people who make games and the ways in which they work, as it is a heavily technical craft with some very specific ways of creating sound, which inform how you create certain sound effects. There are also one or two really good sound design courses out there that have game audio modules and components to them, but again, I’d recommend following a sound path with these rather than music if going for these courses.
Above all we look for people who are passionate about making great games, and not people who are just into making their ‘bit’ of the game sound great – people who are into the big picture and want to collaborate on features with artists, designers and programmers.