The Sound Architect had the pleasure of speaking with Jon Vincent, Studio Audio Director at Rare Ltd, Microsoft Games Studio. Jon has lent his expertise to games such as Conflict: Desert Storm, The Great Escape Wheelman and Driver: San Fransisco. We discuss his journey into audio and gain fantastic advice on how to go about entering the industry.
How did your journey into audio begin?
I built my own studio as I, rather luckily, lived in a house with a sound proofed room. I put in microphone patch bays, headphone extenders etc, so I had a control room, live room set up. I set about writing and recording music as well as recording many of my friends’ bands and producing. I inadvertently got a few tunes together, I also did a fair bit of field recording too, so I was definitely heading in the direction of an audio person. I also used to program a little and was very comfortable with the technical aspects of computers, so when I went for the interview with Pivotal Games I had all the necessary skills for the audio position there. Within three months I was the go-to guy for audio and ended up fairly quickly being head of audio.
Is there a sound/piece of audio you have created that will always stick with you?
The first cutscene in the first game, this was a huge challenge for me and I worked on it for a great deal of time to get it exactly how I wanted it, even coming in on the weekends to go over it. Looking back it was fairly distorted and lacked some clarity, but it had bags of enthusiasm and love.
What do you think is the best example of great audio in a game, new or old?
There are a great many examples to be honest, and I can’t really nail down just one. I think the GTA series has been consistently good over a great number of iterations. This is a combination of great music selection, great SFX (the number of SFX that they play is staggering in of itself), the systems they employ to tailor the sound to the environment, all the while delivering hugely entertaining stories through the VO. All of this is consistently amazing, and I feel often gets overlooked.
What has been your proudest project so far?
Making a new version of Driver (San Francisco), as the original version rocked my world when it came out on the Playstation 1. I played the original in my first week there at Ubisoft Reflections, and some of the original mix decisions formed part of the thinking for the new one (the hugely over the top collision sounds for example ;).
What has been your most challenging project so far?
The Wheelman was tough – I joined the management team at Midway late into the production cycle of the game and there was so much to do. The PS3 version of the game had completely broken audio, literally we were hitting the system way too hard and were regularly getting loud blasts of static from the speakers. I replaced all of the gunshots in the game by the end of the first week (as the ones that were there weren’t great and I had just done 7 years of making war games – these assets shipped with the game unchanged), and I kept up that pace for many months doing crazy hours etc. By the time, some 7-8 months later, we sent it off to Microsoft and Sony for submission I had completely fixed the PS3 version (with the help of some heavyweight programmers it has to be said) and the game audio was at the quality I felt comfortable with.
This current project has been tough too though, new platform (Xbox One + new Kinect), new game engine, new audio pipelines new… well everything. In a year and a half though, this game is playing and sounding great, so kudos to the programmers here at Rare who have done brilliantly to get this to where it is today.
What would be your dream project to work on?
Something Sci-Fi. I haven’t done any Sci-Fi apart from doing the initial development of Necessary Force in the months before Midway went under, there are some great opportunities for sound design and music in Sci-Fi.
What would be your advice for aspiring sound designers who want to make it in the games industry?
Do your homework.
Games companies require two disciplines of their sound designers.
- One is to be able to make incredible audio assets from their DAW’s.
- The other is to be able to make it work with other games systems (physics systems, car systems, gun systems etc).
There are game engines that you can play with for free – Unreal and Cry Engine are a couple I can think of off the top of my head, these have audio middleware implemented into them already, so there is no excuse to not learn these and have a go at doing various systems in the demo levels that come with the game, even the middleware designer clients are free to use. I would like to see examples of implementation of Environment audio, footfalls, gun audio, interactive music, etc – anything. I would require proof that an inexperienced audio designer has done this and knows the process and how to approach designing sound in this way. I have employed someone who had no experience but did the above, and that person did great and is now working on Ubisoft’s watchdogs.
What are the major Do’s and Don’ts for applications in your opinion?
Prove that you can design sounds in an interactive framework as I’ve described above, if you don’t and you just do some linear design to a film or some such, however nice that audio may be, it isn’t much use in modern studios without the implementation experience.
How do I stand out from the crowd?
By producing great audio assets and learning how to implement it into modern game engines. If you know the process for one engine, you will be comfortable with most of them – honestly.
What lies in the future for game audio in your opinion?
Well with new hardware coming out which brings with it more horsepower and memory, you will be surprised at the level of modelling available to the humble audio designer.
There will be ways that you can do real-time processing and number crunching that we would have only been able to do in an off-line, pre-baked way before. This is the same for the graphics pipelines too, so the immersion and level of detail that will be responding to you as you play the interactive experience will be amazing and completely new. Think of the difference between the games that you used to get on the original Xbox against something like GTA V on the Xbox 360, it will be the same again, once us creative folk get our heads around the opportunities!
Jon is currently Studio Audio Director at Rare Ltd, Microsoft Games Studio and continues to use his talents and create fantastic Xbox games such as the Kinect Sports Franchise.
Interview by Sam Hughes
Uploaded 13/11/2013