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MillimeterThe Sampler — September 14, 2005
Sep 14, 2005 12:46 PM
Video Games Prove Lucrative for SFX Libraries
Often in this space, we talk about how SFX and libraries are used in films, radio and TV commercial spots, industrials, etc. But one area we haven't delved into much, and one which is actually quite lucrative for library companies, is the booming video game market. As you undoubtedly know, this is probably of the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment industry, a multi-billion dollar behemoth with a demographic spread that is also expanding and now includes much more than just the stereotypical teenage boy with glazed eyes exercising his thumbs on a game controller day and night (although I do have one of those living in my house).
As games have become more sophisticated through the years, their audio requirements have changed tremendously. It wasn't that long ago that the soundtrack of most games was dominated by the most rudimentary sound effects imaginable and cheap-sounding electronic keyboards for music. Now there are bona fide stars and celebrities occasionally lending their voices to characters, orchestral scores being recorded in major studios, popular songs littering soundtracks, and sound designers devising their own original effects—a slightly scaled-down version of what happens on a regular Hollywood film. Budgets for major games now commonly go into the low millions, but the payoff is worth it—the most successful titles, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Madden NFL, Mafia, Halo 2, Battlefield Vietnam, and The Sims, make many more millions for their creators. And even though the trend, increasingly, is for game makers to do original sound design and foley, SFX and sample libraries are widely used up and down the industry.
The other day, I called Fred Jones, facilities director at Electronic Arts (EA) in Redwood City, Calif., to find out whether that company was commonly using libraries in its games. EA is one of the leading game companies in the world, with development studios in the San Francisco Bay Area; Los Angeles; Orlando, Fla.; Austin, Texas; Montreal; Vancouver, British Columbia; London; and Tokyo. When I visited its headquarters during the making of its popular Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King game in the fall of 2003, I learned that most of the effects for that game had come from audio stems from the actual Lord of the Rings films provided to the game designers by the crew that had worked on Peter Jackson's epic films. Still, there was some foley done at EA, and some minor contributions from libraries. That game, though, is the exception, not the rule.
"Actually, we regularly pull from all kinds of effects libraries," Jones says. "We hardly ever go the well of music libraries, though. Music libraries tend not to fit what we're doing and the way marketing is going now for games, they like to have commercial tie-ins and that gives more of an opportunity for original music and licensed music to have more of a spot than library music at this point. I wouldn't say we'll never use it, but it's not the way the trend is going here.
"On sound effects libraries, if the effect we want is in a library and it will save us some time, we'll do it. If it's something that's real specific, we'll go out and get it: We have our own location recording equipment, so we can get what need. Sometimes, though, we start organically with a library effect and modify it from there.
"We own ... I won't say every single commercially available sound effects library, but we own most of them, that's for sure," he continues. "We have a deal with several of the publishers, like Sound Ideas, where we have everything they make, and we put it all up on our servers so we can download whatever we need. When new libraries come in, we put them on the server right away so they're easily accessible. Of course we also have developed our own libraries, from having made so many games, and some, but not all of that material, is available to other people in EA who are working on games."
"What wouldn't be available?" I ask.
"There may be issues of licensing on some things," Jones says. "Let's say, for instance, we have our own proprietary libraries that are licensed to a particular title, like the Lord of the Rings stuff. We might have that on a server, but the people working on a James Bond game couldn't use effects from Lord of the Rings legally, so they don't have access to that part of the server."
"Fortunately, the folks making the James Bond game don't need the sounds of Orcs battling Elves," I note.
"That's true," Jones agrees with a laugh, "but fighting sounds might be the same no matter what century in it's in: A punch is a punch is a punch. But some of them are recognizable and some of them have been custom-made by Hollywood sound designers who know their stuff and might get miffed if they heard their work in a game it's not supposed to be in. So we're pretty careful about rights and who has access to what."
Returning to library usage, Jones says, "At this point it's probably about 50/50 of what is ours and what is theirs—or at least starts as theirs and then we modify it into something else. I'd say we tend to use the libraries for more normal sounds. When it comes to gun shots [for a shooter game], or, in the case of Madden [football games], the crowds, we'll get those custom because they're so integral to the game and we want them to sound special. And simple foley stuff like footsteps and keys jangling—we'll do that ourselves in our studio, or if we need to, we'll go out to Skywalker [Sound recording studio]. But effects libraries are definitely a part of what we do here."
As for a specific recent video game project that used libraries, Mix writer Heather Johnson recently spoke to some of the creators of the popular fantasy/martial arts Xbox title Jade Empire (from BioWare, distributed by Microsoft), and learned that both SFX libraries and sample libraries were used in different aspects of the game. The music score by Jack Wall employs a wide variety of traditional Chinese instruments and Asian percussion, but for the "Western" part of the score, rather than hiring a 70-piece orchestra (as he had done for the game Myst IV: Revelation), he used a number of different sample libraries, including the Vienna Symphonic Library for strings, ProjectSam for brass, the Sam True Strike 1 orchestral percussion library, the Sonic Images sample library, Advanced Orchestra for some of the woodwinds, and "a sprinkling" of the Garritan Orchestral Libraries. "The final result," Johnson writes, "was over 90 minutes of score, including cinematics and in-game, which was then divided into tracks one-and-a-half to two minutes long."
Meanwhile on the FX side of Jade Empire, the creators decided to mostly make their own from scratch. "We wanted Jade Empire to be quite unique in its overall sound design, and as such, the majority of the audio was created from field and foley recordings," says BioWare's chief sound designer, Steve Sims. "[However], we did use some standard libraries like the [Sound Ideas] General 6000, but we manipulated them beyond recognition and deeply layered them together in our DAWs."
We'll have more on the use of libraries in games in future editions of The Sampler.
Ilio: Quality Samples From Top Designers
Last month, we profiled the Vienna Symphonic Library and noted that a top American distributor for that fine product is the Los Angeles-based Ilio Entertainment, which has been a significant clearing house for sample libraries for just more than a decade.
"I started the company with my wife back in 1994," says Ilio boss Mark Hiskey. "I was a composer-musician working on a project for a children's video game and I needed some string sounds and a friend of mine had a Synclavier, which had a really great string sound. I was wishing I had that for my Sample Cell, which was my axe of choice at the time, but the only way to get it was through my friend, and that made me wonder if other people might want the Synclavier library for their samplers as well. So I approached the Synclavier company and they liked the idea, because at the time they were reeling from the collapse of NED [New England Digital], so they licensed me their sound library and I used that to create the Synclavier Sample Library for Akai, Roland, and Sample Cell samplers, and that's how Ilio got started."
"Where does the name come from?" I ask.
"When we were searching for a name for the company, we found in a trademark search that a lot of the ones we liked were already taken," Hiskey says. "In a fit of desperation, we looked at a map of Hawaii we had hanging on our kitchen wall and 'Ilio' was the name that jumped out at me—it's on the island Molokai. It was easy to say and remember. And we love Hawaii!"
"[Ilio's clients] run the gamut from high-end pro film composers, record producers—the guys who win the Grammys and the Oscars—down to your average hobbyist who's looking for a way to make high-quality music on his computer, and everything in between," Hiskey says. "Within our niche it's a very wide demographic."
This fact isn't surprising when one considers the broad range of products offered by Ilio. Under its own brand, it has such titles as The Memphis Horns, World Winds Stark Raving Beats, Ethno-Techno, and Trancefusion; a series dedicated to Synclavier sounds; and Propeller Island, collections devoted to gongs, gamelan instruments, cathedral organs, and more. And then there are the many libraries they distribute for other companies: the aforementioned Vienna Symphonic Library; the very highly regarded and wide-ranging Spectrasonics libraries, which include contributions from the likes of Hans Zimmer, Marcus Miller, and others; Canadian company Applied Acoustic Systems' virtual instrument libraries; thousands of sounds from French sample developers Ultimate Sound Bank; and several others—and Hiskey says he's always on the lookout for more.
"We'd like to expand in every direction," he says. "We don't really have any one thing in mind. However, I can say that we're looking into some things that we're not announcing yet that are going to be aimed at a younger, more entry-level market, because we have a lot of the pros already, so we're hoping to attract some different people."
"Tomorrow's pros?" I offer.
"Exactly," he says.
For more info, go to ilio.com.
What's on your mind? Want to share a story about how you used a sample library on a project? You know where I'm hiding: blair@blairjackson.com.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
