Trigger Happy
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soundtracks. At first, this looks very like film industry
practice, but it soon becomes clear that deployment of
the audio arts cannot always follow similar lines in the
two media.
The reason sound design is important in
videogames is quite simple: if a laser makes a
pleasing, fizzy hum, and if an exploding enemy makes
a particularly satisfying boom, then the game is just
more fun to play. Defender (1980) had particularly
avant-garde sound design for its time, with its near
sub-bass rumblings and eldritch alien buzzings offset
by the heroic, almost melodic sound of your ship’s
weapon fending off the vicious hordes. Purely abstract
sonic invention such as Defender’s was partly
necessitated by the comparative crudeness, in those
days, of the videogame machine’s sound chip. But
now that videogame systems can read huge amounts of
digitally encoded sound straight off a CD, sound
design has largely moved in a more conventional
direction, using “samples” (digital recordings) to
reproduce actual, real-world sounds. A modern
development company might devote many hours to
accurate sampling of different cars’ engine noises for a
driving game, to make the whole audio-visual
