Summary
Game audio has evolved considerably over the last few decades, with the soundtracks and sound effects of Marvel video games rivaling those of their Hollywood contemporaries. Although the music and sound from earlier game generations are of course still impressive from a creative and technical standpoint, the industry has seen major leaps both in terms of sound quality and the tools that audio designers like Gary Miranda have at their disposal.
Gary Miranda has been working on games professionally for more than 15 years and has seen firsthand how audio design has changed, especially when it comes to the way games in theMarvelfranchise approach sound design. Speaking with Game Rant, he went into detail about how games in the franchise have been afforded more freedom to stray away from the sounds used in the films in favor of creating their own unique game sound effects. He also spoke about how audio designers are becoming increasingly involved in the development process, rather than strictly being responsible for the creative side.
Marvel Games No Longer Need to Be Based on Movies
When Gary Miranda was working onMarvel tie-in gamesin the 2000s, it was generally expected of audio designers to work with audio assets directly from the film. For an audio designer, this can be heavily limiting, as tens of hours of video game content will naturally call for far more variety than an hour-and-a-half-long film. Thankfully, there are plenty of techniques that a skilled audio designer can use to work with a limited set of sounds, but it’s certainly a challenge.
In that era of the late 2000s, game tie-ins were directly related to the movie. Now it’s so separated, it’s like we have the Marvel Comics Universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and now the “Marvel Games Universe,” so it’s very much split out between all that stuff having these distinct threads of these universes that they’ve built out now.
If we talked about even just the differences between cinematic and games, the audio itself, they’re kind of related, but they’re allowing everybody to do their unique spin on everything. Back at Studio West and working on trailers it was very focused on “Here’s the sounds from the movie. We want to use these specific things.”
Although there isn’t an official Marvel Games Universe, it’s clear that the games are now completely distinct from the Marvel films and even from each other.Games likeMidnight Sunshave much more freedom to experiment and develop their own identities, characters, and soundscapes than the older movie tie-ins of the 2000s.
The Game Audio Industry Has Become More Accessible
Similar to howsolo indie developersare now able to captivate millions of people from their bedrooms, audio design has also become a profession that has grown increasingly accessible for passionate newcomers. The necessary software is often orders of magnitude more affordable than a fully kitted-out physical setup once was, meanwhile, a career’s worth of knowledge is freely available on YouTube and elsewhere on the internet. This accessibility has allowed audio designers to become more involved in the development process, working with the developers and the engine directly to implement and tweak new sounds.
It’s become much more of a melding of the creative side and the technical side. We’re seeing a lot of people who are coming out of college or coming out of school or just up and coming and they have such strong technical background now, or they have such strong technical abilities now, being able to merge those two things has really changed with game audio. The audio industry itself is now focused a lot on technical ability merging with the creative design side, so we’re able to grow that much more.
Even just five to 10 years ago, there was a bit of separation between audio designers just doing design work, and then you had the technical people doing the implementation and the engine setup, or doing the scripting and things like that.
Garry Miranda’s company Injected Senses Audio is living proof of this: a small group of passionate sound designers and audio engineers have proven time and again that they can hold their own when working on sound for major titles likeFortniteandInsomniac’s Marvel games. With fewer roadblocks for aspiring creators, the industry gets to benefit from a greater pool of talent than was possible a few decades ago.
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