Could video game music be your next professional gig?
Keyboard went to the Game Developers Conference and
talked to game audio king Tommy Tallarico to find out.
Whether you’re still employed or
someone whose gig evaporated like assets
in a 401(k), recessions are a great time to
figure out what you want to be when you
grow up. Reinvent yourself. Add new marketable
skills to your repertoire. Learn to
play the accordion. Or better yet, find work
that’s both musical and suited to those of
us who like things that go bleep in the
night. Say, a job creating music and sound
effects for video games.
Urban legend has it that gaming is
recession-proof. In tough times, people turn
to entertainment for distraction. And with
this recession applying seemingly no downward
pressure to movie, concert, and sports
ticket prices, staying in to play games is
more popular than ever. This is why pundits
crow about video games generating more
revenue than Hollywood films (if DVD sales
of those movies aren’t factored in).
With all this in mind, we attended the
2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC)
in San Francisco this past March, to suss
out the career prospects for keyboardists.
THE BACKSTORY
A CNET wrap-up of the GDC described
market conditions for the game industry
succinctly: The games business is flourishing,
and though many believe it is in fact
recession-proof, it hasn’t been immune to
economic contraction. Game goliaths
including Microsoft and Electronic Arts
have closed studios and collectively laid off
thousands of workers.
Evidence of this duality was rampant at
the GDC. On one hand, interest in smaller
and independent game developers was
high — indie gaming sessions drew standing-
room-only crowds. On the other, the
entire first floor of the Moscone Center’s
west hall was devoted to a Career Pavilion.
Activision, Blizzard, Eidos, Epic,
Insomniac, Konami, LucasArts, Microsoft,
Sega, Sony, THQ, and Ubisoft were
among the companies recruiting.
LOW-HANGING FRUIT
With thousands of professional game
developers pounding the pavement looking
for work, how could this be a good time for
newbies to break in? Veteran game composer
and sound designer Tommy Tallarico
explains, “Our industry goes in cycles.
Right now, we’re seeing a resurgence
driven by new platforms like the iPhone,
Xbox Live, and PlayStation 3 Home.
Because of them, all of these small development
companies are popping up.
“When I first got into the industry,” Tallarico
continues, “you could build a game
with three or four guys in a garage. And that
was cool. Some of the great innovations of
the late ’80s and early ’90s happened in
those garages. Towards the end of the 20th
century, it became all about big-budget,
300-person teams. If you wanted to score a
game you had to be an A-list composer,
working on a triple-A title. Now, we see
things coming full circle. With the barrier to
entry lowered, it’s a great time for people
looking to get into game audio to get their
foot in the door. Granted, budgets aren’t as
big for these smaller games, but they represent
a fantastic opportunity.”
ESSENTIAL RESOURCES
Before you run off and start Googling
game companies, here are a few things
that’ll streamline your search. The Independent
Game Developers Association
(idga.org) has chapters all over the world.
“IGDA is a non-profit,” Tallarico explains,
“and it’s a great place to network and meet
up-and-coming game developers, because
it’s all about networking. Half of a career in
games is talent, and the other half is networking
and selling yourself, which is why I’ve
been successful — there are composers
who can write circles around me. It’s about
the networking. That’s how I keep my head
above water.”
GANG, or Game Audio Network Guild
(audiogang.org), is an organization dedicated
to advancing the interests of professional
interactive audio developers. It offers
resources, tools, job postings, news, and
contact lists to its members. Additionally,
members have access to white papers,
audio system architectures, and business
contracts. GANG was founded by Tallarico
and a long list of industry luminaries.
You’ll find extensive job listings on
gamasutra.com, which also features breaking
industry news, and editorial content
about every aspect of game development
from design and programming to production
and publishing written for and by
industry pros. Gamasutra.com is by the
folks who produce Game Developer magazine
and the GDC.
LINEAR VS. INTERACTIVE
It’s been a long time since game audio was
bleeps and bloops generated by sound
chips. Today, production values rival the best
film soundtracks — 5.1 surround, orchestral
scores performed by live musicians, state-ofthe-
art sound design, and voiceover
recorded at 16-bits and 44.1 or 48kHz.
Games for cell phones and handheld
devices, however, have ushered in a return
to MIDI-driven sounds, because smaller files
are needed to fit within network bandwidth
and device memory limitations.
“For folks coming from film or television,”
says Tallarico, “the mindset is that they’re
providing an underscore or background
music. You know, film and TV is storytelling.
It’s all about dialogue. Eighty or 90 percent
of what they’re writing is mixed underneath
someone talking. The music is a sweetener;
it’s a bed, whereas in games it’s the exact
opposite. Eighty or 90 percent of what we
do is the high-energy action tune. The other
20 percent is underscore for dialogue.
Game audio drives the action. We control
players’ emotions from the get-go.
“Some film composers will tell you that
the best scores are the ones you don’t
notice,” Tallarico goes on. “Throw that out
the window.” The biggest difference
between a film score and a game score is
that film scores are linear — as a composer
or sound designer you have control over the
flow and pacing of your music. Tallarico
points out that “even the great John Williams
has to sit down with George Lucas who
says, ‘Okay, John. At 1:04 the music has to
do X, because Darth Vader just walked in. At
4:23, it has to do Y and Z, because the
Death Star just blew up.’ And that’s cool,
because he has a frame-by-frame map of
what happens when. Whereas in games, a
designer will come to me and say, ‘Here’s a
scenario. A hundred guys on horseback with
swords are coming to kick your ass. Write
me a three-minute piece of music.’ I can now
just envision this battle going on in my head
and create music.”
The nature of game play, however, might
mean that the scene starts out with 100
guys on horseback, but that 100 could
become 50, then 20, then 10, then one,
then nobody. As Tallarico puts it, “You’re
rewriting the same piece of music for four
or five different scenarios.”
Some describe this challenge as a matter
of arranging. In much the way that some
film composers rely on orchestrators to
translate their solo piano score to something
a full orchestra records, a game
music arranger might re-arrange the same
basic piece of music to accommodate a
number of different game states — for
example, player beating enemy easily,
player beating enemy but taking damage,
enemy beating player, and so on.
Tallarico finds that orchestral sound
libraries help him compose for interactive
games. “I can add a female, male, or children’s
choir, or all of them,” he explains. “Or
I can add Taiko drums or something else.
There are so many different layers in
orchestral music that when you’re writing
for games it’s easy to do that layering. But
if you’re writing music with only a threepiece
rock band format, where do you go?”
Another path to getting your foot in the
door is sound design. While it’s challenging
to convey the breadth of your music
composition chops in a three-minute demo,
it is easy for a producer to hear if you’ve
got what it takes to do killer sound effects
in a demo that brief.
THE KEYBOARDIST’S
ADVANTAGE
One of the recurring comments at the
GDC “Audio Boot Camp” sessions was
that the vocabulary of “interactive composition”
has yet to be defined. That is,
there’s no standardized workflow, no
standard tool set throughout the industry.
Even teams that are working on different
titles at the same company use different
techniques and different audio engines.
“The great thing,” Tallarico says, “is
that keyboard players have the advantage
over every other type of musician in the
world because of their understanding of
technology. Keyboard and synth players
are able to get a symphony up and running
on their laptop. If this article were in
Guitar Player, I’d be telling guitarists to
go learn MIDI.”
SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR GAME MUSIC
A lot of game music begins in the same software musicians use for songwriting: Pro
Tools, Sonar, Logic, Digital Performer, Cubase, Live, Reason, and so forth. More specialized
software tools that focus on the interactive nature of game audio are often proprietary
— using them requires a non-disclosure agreement with the game developer
(e.g., Microsoft or Sony) that owns them. However, four interactive audio tools are
downloadable: AudioKinetic Wwise (audiokinetic.com), Firelight FMOD (fmod.org),
Microsoft XACT (msdn.microsoft.com), and SomaTone Casual Audio Design Interface
or CADI (somatone.com).
Which system you should learn depends on whom you ask. Tommy Tallarico recommends
the Windows-only Wwise. Guy Whitmore of Microsoft mentions all four, but
suggests that if you have to pick one, go with FMOD, which runs on both Windows
and Mac OS. Learning any of these interactive music systems will let you demo your
work to a game producer.
Two other programs it’s good to know are Cycling ’74 Max/MSP and Jitter. These
let you roll your own utility, or even full-blown capture-and-record application — a handy
skill to have. According to Robi Krauker of Electronic Arts, expansion packs for the
hugely succesful The Sims series contain upwards of 50,000 audio assets, many of
which are “Simlish” dialogue tracks. Simlish is a made-up language designed to convey
emotion without real-world verbal meaning. The team found that recording with Pro
Tools was taking too long, so a team member versed in Max/MSP developed a recording
application that tied into their in-house workgroup network. They used Jitter to add
one vital, missing ingredient: the ability to sync audio to animation.
REQUIRED
READING
Aaron Marks’ The
Complete Guide to
Game Audio (Focal
Press), offers an indepth
look at composing
interactive
music for games.