Video Game Binge Weekend

If you work in games, the above flowcharted representation of time management will probably ring a bell for anyone who has ever committed themselves to the consumption of these shiny interactive objects of mystery. In 1999 I implemented a mandatory binge weekend during the Thanksgiving holiday that involved little more than 5 consecutive days of hardcore gaming.  This was my allowance for the year and it was understood that I would be regressing deep into the worlds created by others.

Life would have to continue of course, and you'll see plotted in the flow other things that would be filling up my time off. My priorities were split during the break between my family, house projects, and another pursuit that has dominated my life: rock and roll. This commitment to music was also reflected in that my wife holds down double duty as Bass Guitar and Flute Player in the unified pursuit of noise making. You'll see, deftly slotted, a casual reference to "Band Practice" which ended up represented over on the music side of this site.

I hadn't owned a system since the Sega Genesis and so each year I would rent the console du jour, a current crop of interesting titles, then have at it for an extended visit back to the pixelated days of my youth. Through these brief skinny dips into the modern gaming culture of the day I experienced some great (and not so great games): Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, Parasite Eve, Rez, Final Fantasy X, Myst, Tempest 2000, and countless others that have been lost to the slippery slope of memory.

When it came time to get serious about a career (something that most people do early on in their life) I was already in the throes of fatherhood, a homeowner, and working a 9-5 to make ends meet. Out for a walk one day my wife asked me a deceptively simple question "If you could do anything and get paid for it, what would it be?" My answer was more than a little abstract, and I said "Make weird noises" and her response was "Well aren't there people who do that, and make a living?"

It took months to calculate the simple equation that had been adding up all of my life:

Games + Sound = Game Sound

From there...well, you can read all about it on the home page. It's hard to say exactly how I got from there to here, impossible to retrace the steps, but looking back it all fell into place after that simple question was answered in the most naive way possible. After that was determined, it was all about figuring out what it meant and what needed to be done to make it happen...not exactly a straight line, that's for sure.

For anyone out there following your bliss, the road isn't always easy but it comes with great rewards.
Keep chasing the butterflies!

-lcl

Game Audio Re-Education

Turns out I've been at this for awhile (if you measure things in game years). I took a moment and paused this morning as I found myself on an archeological dig through a folder simply marked "Game Audio Presentations". Only it's not quite that simple (it never really is).

Digging back through the documents I began to see my career unfolding with each slide. The fundamentals of my education read between the lines in technical documents and whitepapers. So many words written by so many influential people who I truly owe my grasp and understanding of interactive audio to. Thanks to everyone who ever spoke, wrote, or pontificated on the art sound in and/or around games.

So without much (more) blubbering, and only a tiny bit of editing of the contents within the folder, I've zipped up the monsterous tome of game audio related madness and stuck it online in a convenient to download pile of pseudo-randomness. Many, if not all, of these can likely be found online given the resourcefulness of people in this day and age...but I've done the hard work for the past 7 years so you don't have to!

If you find something in there that shouldn't, if you're the original author and would rather go unread, if there's something buried within a presentation that offends you...please drop a line and let me know. It would be great to hear about unearthed treasures and sparks of wisdom gleaned from these papers, please feel free to share your epiphanies and recommendations in the comments section.

Otherwise, please go forth and learn:
Download 700MB: Game Audio Presentations

Holla,
-lcl