perspective

So you want to create music and sounds for video games? You know all your arpeggios, and tremolos, and stereos? Gee, that's great. What do you know about memory management, data compression, tight editing, looping, downsampling, streaming, and load-on-demand?

Allow me to explain: I recently created my first bank of background sounds for one level of the new Mortal Kombat. Being the eager rookie, I did my best to create killer effects, yet deliver them in as small and concise of a format as I could come up with. The bank I ended up with was TEN TIMES the size that was allowable. Time for some schoolin'... after two days, I have hacked, slashed, squashed, and thrown out enough bytes to finally allow the game to not choke on all my audio data... but it was NOT PRETTY.

Let me give you an example of parallel situation:

You hear a knock at your front door. You open it. Luigi Braggadocio, the new artistic director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, is standing in the doorway. He's offering you elephant bucks to commission a new full symphony for the NY Phil to perform during their upcoming concert season. He's offering you the latest and greatest tools and technology to do the job (ummm... must be a really nice pencil...). He says he wants it to totally kick ass (those are my words, not his). You are speechless -- it's rather short notice, but how could you possibly refuse such an amazing opportunity?!?

He says there's only one condition -- "you've got to give it to us in this format" -- and he hands you a cocktail napkin.

Right about now, you're thinking that a drink might go reaaaally well with that napkin...