The aural adventures of video games

The video game industry is bigger than Hollywood. Last year, the industry that once gave us pill-popping Pacmen, mushroom-hooked plumbers and a speed-addict hedgehog generated £180 billion dollars in revenue. 

Gaming has sent shockwaves throughout the industry, with agencies hustling to advertise in games, for games and with gaming tech.

Not sure what that is in gold coins, rings or Hyrulian rupees, but it’s hard to ignore. Gaming has sent shockwaves throughout the industry, with agencies hustling to advertise in games, for games and with gaming tech. The art of selling games is now more exciting than ever before: big-budget epics garner hundreds of millions of streams on YouTube, drumming up feverish excitement for the bigger-budget epics gamers can’t wait to play.

Hollywood actors have been voicing games for decades, but now we’re seeing A-list names feature behind and in-front of the camera for AAA [high-budget, high-profile games] game trailers - as in the recent campaign for Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, featuring Pete Davidson, with sound design by Machine’s James Cobbold.

Above: Hollywood actors are not just adding their voices to video games but are acting within the commercials to promote them.

Much like the products they’re selling, these ads regularly implement boundary-pushing production and storytelling techniques. This is important; these trailers aren’t selling a 120-minute cinema or sitting room session, they’re asking us to buy into a 120-hour adventure, or an ongoing online event; a destination, a set of characters, a story, an experience. Moreover, they’re not just trailers, they’re short films that pack all of the above into 90-or-so seconds of standalone narrative, servicing the game, while serving everything inside it up on a tasty 4K platter.

We have to sell these worlds by imagining everything down to the most minor audio detail, questioning what sound each and every one of them should make, and why.

Machine has been fortunate enough to work on a number of these projects and, looking back, I’ve considered how important sound design can be in summarising and selling this experience to excited gamers, how we use sound to convey new worlds, narrative, gameplay, character and (vitally) fun. More often than not, game developers are opting for length over replayability. Accordingly, AAA games are more often bigger, longer and packed with just a little bit more character and plot than the classic platformer. The ‘open’ worlds they’re building are teeming with life, and the games set within them are long enough to match.

It’s been a little while since I’ve had the time to pick up a controller so, thankfully, it’s not within my remit to clock up all those hours. Regardless, the task of transmuting that experience into a 60+ second advertisement is still a daunting one. The point is to do justice to that experience, to work together with a wider team all focused on enticing gamers old and new into paying, devoting much of their free time to it. To do that, we have to sell these worlds by imagining everything down to the most minor audio detail, questioning what sound each and every one of them should make, and why: What’s that gun loaded with? What’s its energy source? Who’s pulling the trigger? What laws of physics does it obey and how does all of that affect what it sounds like? Does it even need to sound like a gun?

Above: Machine worked on the sound design for Watch Dogs: Legion.

We’re like sonic travel agents, and we need active, experience-hungry viewers. Sound design isn’t unique to selling games, but as a world-building tool it’s particularly well suited to the art of showcasing worlds, both familiar and unusual. With the cinematic trailer for cyberpunk sci-fi game Watch Dogs: Legion, Tipping Point, we were honoured to win the trust of Alberto Mielago, the animator and director behind Oscar-winning short The Windshield Wiper, and the groundbreaking episodes of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots, The Witness and Jibaro.

Sound design isn’t unique to selling games, but as a world-building tool it’s particularly well suited to the art of showcasing worlds, both familiar and unusual.

Alberto created a world that offers a unique view into the game’s lore. As oddly realistic as the images are, the same unique approach was taken to the film’s sound. Alberto would travel into London and, on the way, record the most characterful sounds he encountered. Though they were largely different to the images to which they would ultimately be attached, these sound choices give the piece its character; it's the art of using the ‘wrong’ sound. We worked together to help realise these idiosyncrasies in the wider world of the film, mixing the expected and the unexpected together in a sonic uncanny valley.

A traditional approach would have yielded a blander result. We can route our way into the listener’s subconscious by incorporating the unconscious auditory cues we all take in daily - whether riding a packed Tube or relaxing in a park. By contrast, playing with metaphor and substituting sounds (like a distorted barking dog for an angry guard) grabs our attention and places us in a state of engagement. Combining both - forgive me as my brow gets higher - is almost a modernist approach. It creates active viewers, the exact kind of viewer we want to buy into this world.