Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 111 sanctioned fighting. He had previously done the flythrough for the first Unreal, where it flew through the castle. He's immensely talented, and he's the perfect developer in regards to left and right brain. He was originally hired on the first Unreal to do an expansion pack, and then his work turned out to be so good, we're like, "Dude, we're putting you in the game." Tim Sweeney knows that better tools sell engines. But the other key to that is having really, really good artists so that aspiring developers can be like, "Wow, the Unreal Engine technology is so good that my guys can make something as good as that." I'm like, "Yeah, but you don't have Shane or Chris Perna." MVDB: My first game I ever did was a game called Age of Wonders. The guys that made it were doing an internship at Epic Games in America, which back then was called Epic MegaGames. They asked me to come over to sign the contract to make the music for that game, and there I met Tim Sweeney, who was working on something. It just looked like a bunch of corridors at the time. I met Alex there as well, and we just approached Tim and said, "Hey, if this turns into a game, can we make music for it?" He said, "Yeah, sure." And that game became the first Unreal. Peter Hajba, Composer: Tero Kosterma and I were offered to contribute music to Unreal Tournament after you all shipped Unreal. It was very cool to find out that this game could actually play tracker music—all the music in the game is tracker music. Nobody does that anymore. AB: We got a great team together. Dave Ewing, I believe he's still at Epic. In 1999, we were at E3 or GDC in a hotel room with the rest of the Epic folks. Sascha, you came up to me and said, "I've got to compliment you because at first I thought the game was 22 khz, 8 bit. But then I saw the dropdown that said 44 khz, 16 bit." At first, we only had 8 bit for a long time. I really pushed Dave on that. I was like, "We can't have 8 bit." There are tools that could make 8-bit sounds with smooth fades. It's all how you do the math and how it works, but at the time SoundForge didn't. You would try dithering, you would try all these techniques. I would grab whatever sounds I could, and no matter what, if you had a fade, it would sound bad. So, I was like, "Tim, there's no way this game can go out with 8 bit." And he's just like, "Why?" I showed him, and he's like, "Okay, we'll put 16 bit in," and it was that simple. Sascha, you were really excited about not just that, but the 44 kilohertz. SD: I remember it like it was yesterday. LM: If you had 8-bit dialogue, the S's are gonna sound awful. We had that in educational things, and I had to over- exaggerate everything to make it sound somewhat better. And even then, the S's would still sound like a T-H, right? There's just no way to fix it. MVDB: It's not like we used wav files that are 48 gigs or anything like that. We used really compressed samples for the music, and the file size was usually around three megabytes most of the time—that's it. It was tiny, space was never an issue. EM: Lani, what was the VO process like for this game? LM: Cliff, I remember you'd be on a speakerphone, and you would have me bring in two or three guys to record. We didn't really do a lot of auditions. We would just experiment in the studio and then roll when we hit on what you liked. CB: Lani took the bull by the horns and would just perform so much of the VO herself. Unreal Tournament 1999 console game box art