Feature: 'Hollywood Sound: Part Two'

Today's main Gamasutra feature is the second in a three-part feature by Rob Bridgett, sound director at Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, Canada. This time, he takes a look at surround sound, including lessons to be learned from IMAX and ride films and applied to games. As Bridgett explains in his introduction: "Surround sound, as a concept and a format, has been around for nearly as long as sound itself. Indeed, there seems to have been an early desire to immerse the viewer within the picture. After almost a hundred years, the surround formats have settled down into recognizable consumer formats and brands. Game audio comes to the scene ready to inherit all the technologies and expectations of motion picture surround. In the second part of our look at Hollywood integration into game development, we examine how theatrical and consumer surround sound is used, and how it borrows from, and looks beyond, its filmic antecedents. Games have adopted a slew of branding from cinema in terms of surround sound: Dolby, THX, DTS. This makes complete sense as it represents a standard to which video games content can adhere, provides consumers with recognizable logos in terms of quality cinematic sound and provides compatibility and support from systems already entrenched in the home cinema market that games consoles can make immediate use of. There will probably never be the development of a grassroots surround format exclusively for games, although we may see some of the more cutting-edge developments for cinema surround getting more attention from gamers than from a film audience." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).