Feature: 'Audio Postmortem: Scarface: The World is Yours'

For today's Gamasutra feature, we present an audio postmortem for Vivendi Universal Games' Scarface: The World is Yours, based on the 1983 Universal Pictures film classic, presenting a “what if?” scenario in which the main character, Tony Montana survived the film's mansion shootout. Here, the game's audio director Rob Bridgett offers a look behind the scenes at what exactly went into the the title's $2.5 million dollar audio budget as he discusses the ups and downs in this extensive postmortem. In this excerpt, Bridgett comments on the team's efforts to capture the distinctive vocal essence of Al Pacino's original character: “Getting the character of Tony Montana right was the core goal of the dialogue; if this couldn’t be done, then we had no game. A grueling process of auditions commenced in 2004, which encompassed the whole of North America. There were only two or three sound-alikes that could have fit the bill and these auditions were collated and sent off to Al Pacino for final selection. By far the finest, and the one who was selected in the end, was Andre Sogliuzzo, who, as fortune would have it, turned out to have been Pacino’s driver around ten or so years ago, which gave him all the knowledge he needed to accurately mimic the character of Tony Montana” He later added: “One of the great things we were able to do was to have all our notes on the sessions entered directly into the script via laptop in digital form directly into Excel and exported digitally to html files; this meant that we were able to upload the unedited sessions and a digital version of our session notes to our dialogue editors, where they could begin editing right away. There were no hard to understand handwritten notes and there was no need for the editors to be near a fax machine, this meant that our dialogue editors could be anywhere in the world.” You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the topic, including more from Bridgett on the processes and hurdles the team had to go through in creating, capturing, and integrating voices and licensed music into this movie inspired action game (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).