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 115 Scream Tracker. Impulse Tracker was Jeffrey Lim, who is from Australia. It was based on Scream Tracker, but like you were saying, Peter was a bit better than that. But this was all PC-based stuff. MVDB: Yeah, we just tried to rip everything out of Impulse Tracker. It's really easy to loop anything with that program, it just auto loops everything you do. So, the looping was actually really easy. Most of the tracks were about five minutes long. The music I make now is really hard to loop. You have to make a stem that goes on indefinitely now. But back on UT, I just made the music, and six months went by, the game was released and then I heard what was in it at that point. EM: The weapons in UT are so iconic. Each of them is exciting to use, impactful, and super fun. Sascha, how did you go about differentiating the sounds of each weapon in this game? SD: I remember at the Beatdown Party, sitting next to Cliff and playing with the first gun. The iconic first weapon that you have in the game. And the sound was just so weak. One important thing is that just like in movies, guns should really have an impact. You have to feel like you're holding a weapon, with some weight to it. For me personally, that's always the most important thing. When I play a game today, if the first couple of weapons felt flimsy, I'm already done. If they have some weight and you really feel the punch, then I'm interested. I remember for UT, after talking to Cliff, I learned we have a certain amount of weapons. We had a laser gun in the game called the Shock Rifle. It had a little bit of an electricity buzz to it. CB: Yeah, there was a hit scan for the main shot, but then the alternate fire was like an orb, and then you could actually shoot the orb and make it explode, which was inspired by the scene in the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Hard Target. He throws the gas, kicks the gas can up and shoots it and makes it explode in the guy's face, which is completely over the top, but it made for a great game mechanic. SD: I wasn't really a sound designer at the time. I was more of an aspiring musician. I was just thrown into sound by Cliff because I complained about it, and I wanted to prove that I could do it. There was a learning curve to it at the time because I had no clue how to EQ sounds, or how to even put sounds together. It was like a puzzle for me. I had all these separate sounds, I don't remember what software I used at the time—it was something that was multitracked. I would have a sub-kick for the beginning of sounds, something to give you that "oomph," and then all these different layers. I recorded some of the sounds with my neighbor shooting guns outside in LA with this crappy microphone, because I didn't have anything else. Desperate times called for desperate measures. I might've stolen the little reload sound from something else, but I changed it a little bit. I remember sitting in my apartment all day, hitting play over and over. The gameplay was so fast, but I felt out the right moments and just thought, "Okay, is this perfect now?" I think my gun sounds were used for a lot of sequels too. There was Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and I think the sounds were used for quite a long time on the sequels. CB: Yeah, because they were good. AB: I think they were used all the way until Unreal Championship 2004, sometime around then. SD: It was a fun challenge because I really gave shit, I felt like I had to do it. But the fact is I never did sound design on a game again. I turned down every sound design job offered to me after that because it was so much work. I have huge respect for sound designers because that shit is really a lot of work. I just stick with music now. CB: Sound designers always love telling the story about how they created the ultimate headshot sound. It's like, "We dropped a watermelon off of a five-story building." SD: This was the first gig I had, and it was also my last gig. I was burned out after sound designing the weapons for UT. I was like, "No, that's not for me." I was definitely a one-hit wonder. PH: Being able to use a multitrack editor was quite groundbreaking. When I was working on sounds for Max Payne, I just started with SoundForge. It's just a single-track editor, so it's destructive. You would have to mix sounds together by just dragging one sound on top of the other, and then it would be a permanent bake. Then somebody introduced me to Vegas, which is a video-editing program, but it had multiple audio Unreal Tournament 1999 PC game box art