Archived Rare Life Profile – GoldenEye 007 Musician

Here’s a bit of run down on what went on in the life of GoldenEye with regard to audio.

TUNES

These were great fun to work on, as it gave us a chance to mess around with the original 007 theme tune that everyone knows so well. Work on the audio started roughly September ’95 and carried on right up to the end of the year making last minute adjustments, even though the bulk of the work was completed in about eight to ten months.

At the beginning there was a great fear of the unknown given that programming work was underway to try and get the N64 to make some noise (when it clearly wasn’t interested in doing that). It was not the smoothest of rides, as regular software and hardware updates that weren’t compatible with the last were all obstacles to overcome.

Regarding the tunes, first of all we sequenced them through Midi, using a few synths, sound modules and samplers. Some of the tunes were composed with just a brief outline of what a particular level would be like, i.e. ‘Control Centre, Cuba’. So not much to go on there then, but later in the game we could walk around the levels getting a good idea of what the level music should sound like, and if necessary re-writing tunes from the earlier levels.

When the Midi version was done, the job was to squeeze all the sounds into the smallest amount of memory possible whilst keeping the sound quality as high as we could. By transferring the sounds from a sample to a Silicon Graphics Indy via Midi dump, work could begin on the N64. Using excellent in house audio tools, we could change anything in the Midi sequence that needed to be done using Cubase on a PC which was linked directly to the N64. This was greatly needed as the sequences sounded completely different at first from the Midi versions and much editing was needed to make the tunes work on the N64.

We found that working with a cartridge based system was more versatile than that of a CD system given what we wanted to do with the music in GoldenEye which was to give it some degree of interactivity. For instance on the Severnaya Bunker level, if an alarm detects you the music changes, you know that something’s happening, and lo and behold before you know it the guards are all over you like a rash.

SOUND EFFECTS

With the sound effects, we watched a lot of films (all in the name of research of course) where the theme was guns, shooting and more guns. Hard Boiled and The Killer by John Woo were particular favourites, he makes great films where you’re guaranteed ridiculous body counts and two handed gun action. They also gave us an excuse to use the cartoonish ricochet sound effects that you can hear in GoldenEye, as we could say “well, they used them in Hard Boiled.”

The guards getting hit reactions were recorded in our soundproofed room, which is simple but practical. Basically a DAT machine, compressor and Neuman U87 microphone are all we need. The voices were our very own programmer and designer types from the team, who found a gap in their busy schedules to do some shouting. The fun sound effects though were all the gadgets that Bond gets to use in the game – the Key Analyser for instance is the floppy disk on a Yamaha SY77 synth trying to write to a bad disk, and the data download effect is the noise of a Commodore 64 loading a game.

The tricky part about all these sound effects was how to fit them into the cartridge space provided for audio, the total amount we had for all samples and music sequences was just over a megabyte, which is luxury compared to working on the Super Nintendo – but if you consider that the average PC game has 4 meg just for sound in memory at any one time, we were up against it.

That’s where our specially developed tools came into their own again, cutting sample rates, re-Eqing the sounds etc. all to give over the impression that they were of a higher sample rate than they actually were. All the sounds are then compressed up to 4:1 using ADPCM compression, it’s not masses of space, but with some imaginative use of sounds you can get away with a lot.

TO BE ANY COP AT AUDIO FOR VIDEO GAMES

To get into the business of audio for video games, you’ll need a good knowledge of Midi and a sequencing package like Cubase. An ability to learn new ways of working quickly is essential – one week you could be writing on a Game Boy with its four channels and miniscule memory, then the next the Nintendo 64 with anything from 6 to 24 channels to write for, you could be in a studio recording a guitar, vocal or solo instrument or working on an arcade board with 4 megs of MPEG audio at your disposal.

Basically you need to be able to adapt from project to project, no one gets bored here in the music department. The more styles of music you can write in the better, if you’re only into Drum and Bass or Techno you will starve in this industry as not all games are coin-op racing games. Play existing games and see where you could improve them if you were doing the audio for that game.