Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
112 M PS E . O R G EM: Lani, who was the male voice for "Double kill!" "Multikill!" And all those famous lines of VO? LM: That was Howie Castle. Bill Corkery, who was the studio engineer and owned a VO studio, knew of this announcer for the Cincinnati Reds, or a team like that. So, Howie came in and he'd never worked on any games before. He had a radio-poker kind of thing going on. I remember trying to give him techniques, like I had to make him take his hand and draw a vertical many levels, we want this many songs." It was all going to be done by me and Michiel at first. But then we had people like Andrew Saga, who did one or two songs for the original Unreal. MVDB: Yeah, the first Unreal was more of a cinematic thing. UT was supposed to be an expansion for Unreal at first. I think Unreal had some problems with net code, it didn't work quite well. So, I thought, "Okay, this is going to be an expansion of Unreal, just online. This is just them fixing the game." I wasn't able to play the original Unreal betas cause my PC was shit, so I couldn't do anything. But then I saw the Unreal Tournament beta and it immediately clicked for me, everything about it clicked. I was like, "Yeah, this is going to be my mainline game for the next three, four years." It excited me from the first time I saw a map. UT was frenetic, fast-paced everything. Every song in the game is different; There's no real style to it. There's drums and bass in there, symphonic stuff, beats bass, there's house bass, everything is in there—it was difficult to pin it down. Sometimes we got a map like Facing Worlds, and I felt like, "The music has to be atmospheric ethereal, but it still needs to be fast paced." So that's how I approached that one, I put a drum and bass track in there. AB: Peter, you may have released Razorback before Unreal Tournament came out, right? PH: Yeah, I think the Unreal Tournament version was a remake of that. AB: Yeah, we had these mods to modify games back in the day. There were mod files that were music files, that started on the Amiga and went over to Jazz Jackrabbit on PC, and then Epic Pinball had them, Unreal had them and then UT. So, things would get released on IRC, and there would be just a bunch of nerds that would be downloading this stuff and having a great time just making music line while he was talking to keep his voice moving with the right intonation. It was hard, but we finally got it. And then they pitched the hell out of his voice, so it doesn't even sound like him. You guys did a good job pitching it. EM: Alex, Peter and Michiel, what initial creative direction did Cliff give as you were starting on the music for this game? AB: Cliff, you emailed me and said, "Hey, we're doing this thing, we're doing this Unreal Tournament rocket launcher gameplay on the Facing Worlds map Unreal Tournament Facing Worlds map