Trigger Happy
soundtracks. At first, this looks very like film industry practice, but it soon becomes clear that deployment of the audio arts cannot always follow similar lines in the two media.
The reason sound design is important in videogames is quite simple: if a laser makes a pleasing, fizzy hum, and if an exploding enemy makes a particularly satisfying boom, then the game is just more fun to play. Defender (1980) had particularly avant-garde sound design for its time, with its near sub-bass rumblings and eldritch alien buzzings offset by the heroic, almost melodic sound of your ship’s weapon fending off the vicious hordes. Purely abstract sonic invention such as Defender’s was partly necessitated by the comparative crudeness, in those days, of the videogame machine’s sound chip. But now that videogame systems can read huge amounts of digitally encoded sound straight off a CD, sound design has largely moved in a more conventional direction, using “samples” (digital recordings) to reproduce actual, real-world sounds. A modern development company might devote many hours to accurate sampling of different cars’ engine noises for a driving game, to make the whole audio-visual
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