Production Values: Games People Play

Jan 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Larry the O

           

Game composer Tommy Tallarico tells all.

According to Tallarico, composers have more control writing for games than for film and television.
Photo: Jason Vaughn

Let's talk a bit about interactive composition tools. When you and I started in the industry, all of the tools were homemade, built in-house by each developer. More recently, we've seen the rise of middleware tools that are credible. What's your take on the current state of the tools?

That's a great question. I think the tools really took a big turn about a year or so after the PlayStation 2 and Xbox came out. With the Scream engine for the PlayStation 2, which Buzz Burrowes designed, and the XACT engine for the Xbox, which Brian Schmidt and Scott Selfon and the boys at Microsoft designed, you're talking about real musicians and composers and sound designers creating these tools, with these big companies behind them. The reason those engines were so much better than anything before was that for the first time, you could do things [to author the sound] in real time, on the fly. So all of the power was in the hands of the composers and sound designers. At that point in video-game history, we no longer had to sit there and tell the programmer, “Oh, could you turn that sound effect down? And could you trigger this song at that point in the game?”

What these new tools did was enable us [composers and sound designers] to do everything; we put the songs in, we put the sound effects in. We were able to load up the game, have it and the sound engine running, and tweak all of that stuff as we were playing the game.

That overcame a major hurdle in game-audio production. Overcoming hurdles really is the essence of audio for video games, isn't it?

Absolutely. One of the challenges of being in the video-game industry as an audio person is — still — knowing the limitations of the machine [on which the game will run] and always working around the technology. That's kind of the fun and challenging part, really. Every six to nine months, the technology [involved in producing audio for video games] changes. A lot of times people will ask me to tell them exactly how I do music for video games. But the reality is that it's different every single time. It's always a different approach, a different engine, a different budget, a different technology.

I'll give you an example. At one point, I was working on two basketball games — one for Activision and one for Electronic Arts. You think to yourself, “Oh, two basketball games — at least they have to do something the same. They're the same genre.” But the two were being done completely differently: one was streaming in 30-second looping ambiences, and the other had to have the ambience downloaded into RAM because [the game developers] were streaming the trash-talking that was going on down on the court. One [game] had background music because it was more of a street basketball game, and the other was streaming college drum-corps riffs because it was a college basketball game. So even when the games are the same, the approach is still different.

Now we come to Jack and Tommy's Flying Circus. Tell me about Video Games Live.

Jack [Wall] and I really saw the industry change, especially after we started G.A.N.G. We saw the quality of video-game music go way up, so we wanted to create something for the masses — not just for video-game fans, but for the masses. Something that said, “Look, video games aren't a bunch of bleeps and bloops anymore; this is a legitimate art form. Not only the music, but the craft of video games in general.”

That's why we created the show the way we did. It's not just a symphony playing video-game music; Video Games Live is all completely synchronized to the video and to the special effects. The lights are automated, there's interactivity with the crowd, [and there are] preshow festivals, costume contests, and meet-and-greets with designers and composers afterward. It has the power and emotion of a symphony orchestra, combined with the energy and excitement of a rock concert, mixed with the interactivity, cutting-edge visuals, and fun that video games provide. That's really the best description of Video Games Live.

We have parts of the show where I randomly pick people to come out onstage, and they actually become the video game while the orchestra plays the music and changes it on the fly in real time, depending on what the person is doing onstage and onscreen. That's the fun aspect of video games.