Viedeo game music/sound fx production

[civan]

This may not be the right area for this question but... Just out of curiosity, does anyone here work in the video game industry and produce music/sound fx for games? If so do you use your Access Virus for this?
This question could apply to advanced website design as well (ex. flash, www.2advanced.com type stuff)

Since the economy is slow I thought I might try my luck applying to a video game company for sound designing even though my engineering degree doesn't relate to this at all. I doubt I would qualify but what the heck. I have nothing to loose.

[MaF]

I tried to get into the games industry some years ago and gave up. It's very hard without connections nowadays. The industry is mature. It's nearly as hard as composing for Hollywood. Orchestral soundtracks are the majority (which makes a Virus obsolete) and another thing that came up over the years: licensing music from existing artists (like in the GTA, NFS, FIFA series). However, why not give it a try. Or some more.

[Alakhai]

Virus obsolete? no way. the backbone of videogames music is often orchestral, that's right, but there's always room for some weird fx or a lot of mean bass, no cello can sound like a synth ;)
and of course a lot of atmospheric scores are electronic too.

[Celestry]

Virus obsolete? no way. the backbone of videogames music is often orchestral, that's right, but there's always room for some weird fx or a lot of mean bass, no cello can sound like a synth ;)
and of course a lot of atmospheric scores are electronic too.

Agreed! Not only that, but i recently heard the opening sound sample of Gears of War on an advert for a BBC program. So they will also be using the likes of Spectrasonics, et al.

[Alakhai]

and of course, your gear must be up to the specific task. an orchestra can be perfect for an rpg, but imho playing a game like Unreal needs a techno soundtrack...that means synth heaven! ;)
I think you will need a good mix of orchestral samples, suites like omnisphere and some good synths, then comes the difficult part :)

[Celestry]

Two recent soundtracks that i love are from Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 and Super Stardust HD. The former is sometimes quite dynamic; the likes of filter sweeps applied to lead lines based on the user movements and situations. Super Stardust HD is just good old fashioned Battle Techno/DnB!

(^_^)

[fsx]

I tried to get into the games industry some years ago and gave up. It's very hard without connections nowadays. The industry is mature. It's nearly as hard as composing for Hollywood. Orchestral soundtracks are the majority (which makes a Virus obsolete) and another thing that came up over the years: licensing music from existing artists (like in the GTA, NFS, FIFA series). However, why not give it a try. Or some more.

Actually I've got a very good contact inside Sony America, but the financial crisis is preventing them from hiring new personnel. It seems that they are even planning to close some historical show-rooms around the Globe.
And this sucks because what I always dreamed is to make music for games since the ol' good Amiga days.

[kolektor1]

as a beggininer musician my dream was to make movie soundtracks but my lack of music writing knowledge didnt aloud me to get into that.

later on i start to produce electro n break beat tune n playing pa n stuff, then a day a good mate of mine whos a great web designer programmer asked me to send him tunes for his flash web games projects.

so we started to make demos for his website : my first credit was the end game sequence for a space invader tribute game : you can check it out here :

http://www.99lives.co.uk/InvadersIV/moon.html

then he started to get some paid project os i ve been designing sound track n fx for a game for the promotion of the new cell phone from HTC brand which was done using synthesis n my good old snow !

http://www.touchdiamond.es/

go to extra n then juego, this is the spanish version of the website.

well all this to tell you that sound designing job is pretty difficult you must have contacts to introduce n manage to get sound budget which is the harder part cause most music you hear on website is like public domain stuff n really crappy quality most of the time,

doing sound design is a great job as it suppose you re music to be kind of dynamic to the content, i m still on the learning curve of those process, if you wanna talk to it more just pm me , mate,

cheers,
ntoin.

[civan]

Very cool! Glad that worked out for you. I don't know if I could leave my current profession and get into making a living off of music/sound production. I have to ease into it to make sure I can maintain a reliable income.