GZ Interviews Game Audio Revolutionist “The Fat Man”

by Louis Bedigian

 

The Fat Man has helped revolutionize the world of game audio and paved the way for the amazing soundtracks we have today.  GameZone interviews this phat legend about his incredible accomplishments.

 

Let’s face it gamers: love is in the air.  Maybe it’s the smell of roses blooming in my garden, or maybe it’s the new outfits that Yuna wears in Final Fantasy X-2.  Regardless, my heart is longing for another.

 

Hoping to find that special someone, I checked out the GameZone Personals page.

 

GameZone Personals – February  15th, 2003

 

FAT MAN looking for LOVELY LADY who likes taking long walks on the beaches of ICO.  LOVELY LADY should appreciate the beauty of a 3D sunset, and wouldn't mind spending her weekend on a good old-fashioned scavenger hunt.  FAT MAN desires someone who knows how to be herself, but likes to role-play every now and then.  If interested, you can summon his love at MagicSpell@GameLover.com.

 

GameZone Personals – July 15th, 2003

 

Sweet, kind and considerate WOMAN seeks the companionship of a HEARTY MAN.  This woman's dream man must have a real appetite for life.  He likes the sun and the sand and wants to share nature's beauty with someone lovely.  WOMAN, who studied drama at the Institute for Performing Arts, has found that the best things in life are only acquired after several hours of searching.  Upon finding her HEARTY MAN, WOMAN would like to study the art of Wicca and further her skills as a witch.  If you think you've got what it takes to woo this woman, you can send her an e-mail at Woman_So_Lovely@NeedsLove.com.

 

As you can see, Woman So Lovely is perfect for MagicSpell.  If only these two lovebirds had found each other, then maybe they could have achieved the happy life they’re looking for.

 

I sent MagicSpell an e-mail to see if his heart was still empty.  (If Alicia Silverstone can play matchmaker, why can’t I?)  However, our conversation never reached the topic of love.  Instead, we concentrated on his career as a musician.  As it turns out, MagicSpell is none other than The Fat Man, AKA George Sanger.  He’s helped in creating audio for dozens of games, and has recently written a new book called The Fat Man on Game Audio - Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness. 

 

“It's different,” says George, when asked to describe his book.  “This is not a how-to-do-music-for-video-games book.  The book crosses over into literature.  All kinds of people are reading it who aren't into video gaming and are liking it."

 

George wouldn’t go into further detail about his book, but he did reveal many interesting things about his career as a musician, the games he has worked on, and his plans for the future.

 

Tell us who you are and what it is that you do.

 

George Sanger: I am a man.  I am a man like you.  I eat, sleep and I breathe.  And I picked something to dedicate my short, fragile life to.  And it could have been medicine, I could have worked on science.  But I chose to dedicate everything I have to music and sound for computer games.

 

To break down the detail of that, I've been doing game sound for 20 years, which is a bit longer than anybody else who's still in it.  I guess the next closest is Brian Schmidt who runs audio for X-Box.  I don't know of anybody who's been doing this for longer than I have and is still doing it.

 

A lot of the things I've done and have been allowed to do were things that people would only do if they were insane.  And they've become common practice now.  When Team Fat first started imitating an orchestra sound, it wasn't the thing to do, it was just downright stupid, and nobody else was doing it.  Just to put it in perspective, imagine that somebody had just written a two-minute song with lyrics for a slot machine.  What would you think of it?  You'd think that's dumb.  Well, I just did that yesterday.  And that is what it felt like to do orchestral music for games.  People would say it's a bad idea, why waste your life on it?

 

I believe in these processes of doing things that are fundamentally wrong -- that's what I explore in the book.  To take that idea, look at examples from the way I've done game audio, and apply those lessons to any creative endeavor.  In fact there's a chapter in the book called "How To Understand Everything."  And basically one of the fundamental principles is if you do what people like, then you cannot innovate.  The only way to innovate is not to do what people like.  Because if you do what people like it means that they've already experienced it.  If you know that they like it, you know that they've experienced it.  If they've experienced it, it's been done.

 

It's a crucial problem in games right now.  For instance, I was involved in a discussion on gaming on a list server with these great game developers.  The topic was doing an award show for games, and the overall mood was that you have to have celebrities at an award show because that's what people like.  And we're talking about some of the most creative people in the world and they still want to do what people like.  Imagine the kinds of things that come out of people doing what people like.  It's things like one more da*n award show.

 

The soundtracks that John Williams did are currently the thing du jour, they're the flavor of the month, and people are imitating him a lot.  In fact that's most of what game musicians do, they're asked to imitate John Williams.  In the book I have to point out that when John Williams did Star Wars nobody else had done anything else like that.  When he did Jaws nobody else had done anything like it.  There are a precious few before Schindler's List that had that sound.  So when one is asked to imitate someone, it's like you're asked to be a Beatles impersonation band.  You can never be the Beatles if you're wearing the wig.  Which is funny, and I have to use a British accent to say what John used to say, they can't be imitating us we don't wear Beatle wigs!  When we're asked to imitate John Williams, we're immediately being asked to not be great unless we can imitate the idea in which John Williams works.  For instance he had to force the idea of an original soundtrack onto George Lucas.  Lucas wanted the sound of Holst’s “The Planets” for Star Wars, and John had to say, "You know, I've got something really nice here in my mind, why don't I run this past you?"  And he did that [hums the theme] "Star Wars, wonderful Star Wars" and George said, "That's great."

 

That and other things are in the book.

 

What games have you been involved with?

 

GS: Well, there are far too many to list here.  There are at least 200 hundred of them.

 

A lot of them are firsts.  The funny thing about the game industry is that it's so accelerated that a lot of the things we did at the time had an incredible impact and now they just don't mean anything.  As a game designer, you could have created the best game in the world and three years later no one can play it at all.

 

I did the first two Wing Commanders, which were the first games to sport in a large way an interactive soundtrack.  They were the first game to imitate the John Williams sound.  Actually for years after that there were people imitating our imitation of John Williams...before they got around to imitating John Williams directly 'cause our stuff was so popular (laughs).

 

I did The Seventh Guest, which was a game that turned the idea of multimedia into a viable business model.  Before The Seventh Guest, Multimedia was known as the “zero billion dollar industry.”  The Seventh Guest was the first game to sell more than 60,000 copies.  It sold a million and a half right out of the box.  So in a funny way, you know what I like to say, is that for a while the hottest thing in business was electronics.  The hottest thing in electronics was personal computers.  The hottest thing in personal computers was multimedia.  The hottest thing in multimedia was The Seventh Guest, and some people said that the best thing in Seventh Guest was its music.  Therefore, for a while there, I was the hottest thing in business.

 

I've done a lot of Humungous Entertainment children's titles recently.  I'm doing a lot of slot machines now, and I'm actually allowed to do whatever I want for slot machines so I'm revolutionizing that and I don't think that's an exaggeration to say.  I've ran into people from at least two major slot machine companies so far that have been sent to listen to my games to make [the slot machines] try to sound more like them.  Because the games that I've worked on are making more money.

 

Some of the other games I've done, Maniac Mansion, Ultima Underworld, and Zombies Ate My Neighbors.  There's a little cartoon of me on the last level (he's the one with the cowboy hat on).

 

Do you feel that game audio has advanced to the point where you can do what you want or are still some restrictions?

 

GS: You’ve been able to make any sound a record can make for at least the past ten years.  Regardless, you have always been able to do something fantastic.  And whatever your limitations are, people have always complained about them.  There’s so much you can do, despite limitations.  Because of limitations. It's been as though people have these wonderful digital cameras and they've been using them as nutcrackers.  The answer to your question is yes, people have always been able to do something good.  When I had two bleeps and a blip and I could write a nice little piece for string trio with percussion.  What would Bach have done?  He would have written interesting harmonies, which can be done.  No sense in dwelling on what can’t be done.

 

Right now the ultimate is considered that we can make it sound movie-like, and I think that is the very, very tip of the iceberg.  Our challenge is to sound like something a movie would never dream of.  And when you think about it, the guy who would be most likely to have conquered making adaptive audio (you know, audio that changes with gameplay) would be Michael Land.  He ran the sound department at LucasArts from 1990 to 2000, and co-created iMUSE, the greatest adaptive audio engine ever made.  You’d think that he would be a believer in adaptive audio.  Michael once said that it couldn't be done.  He said that it's impossible because music is so much based on time, and once somebody has gotten a hold of time, once a player takes that away from you, you can't do art.  So we're making paintings with colored sand and giving them to the viewer in a jar, and the viewer is known to be a shaker.  So Michael said you can't do it.  Now I think that that is a little bit like someone who had only seen a painting and says it is impossible for someone to create a painting that interacts with how the user views it.  Someday someone's going to show up with the world's first music sculpture.  And people are going to say, "Ohhhhhh, I get it!"  And no matter what the user does, you can do all kinds of things with a different piece, and no matter what it's always effective.

 

So even though it's a very tiny thing, audio for games, it's still a gigantic challenge.  We don't have a tool to do what we want to do.  There is no anvil, and we're all blacksmiths ruining our hands, banging them up and burning ‘em trying to make a decent horseshoe (laughs).

 

And on the other hand, even though it's a huge challenge, it's absolutely nothing compared to any business that's older than us (50 years).  There's a chapter in the book where I compare game audio to military.  Look, nobody in game audio has ever died.  So how grizzled a community could we be?  How many dues have we paid?  Nothing.  Compare that to the military, and go up to them and say, "You know, what I do is really important."  They're gonna start laughing at us.  If you want a real laugh, you keep going; "You know, I'd be able to do my job better if people would leave me alone."  Any one of our complaints as game audio guys sound incredibly lame compared to an actual established career.  So we like to compare ourselves to the movies, and pick on the few things that we think they have better than us:  Oh, people view them as legitimate. Oh well they get the orchestras.  It's a paradox.

 

How has your GamePlayMusic service been going?

 

GS: The idea, from a theoretic standpoint, has been going fantastic.  But from a practical standpoint it's not doing anything.  No one has ever called and asked to listen to any of it.  So no matter how brilliant the music is -- it could be absolutely perfect -- nobody knows.  And that says something.  I'm not sure what that says but we'll find out eventually.

 

However, I do have a plan in place that has been going along spectacularly.  I have something set up for game producers to listen to GamePlayMusic, and that might have an effect on things.  It’s a new standard file format called IXMF…game developers should watch for it.  You players will know that it kicked in when you find that your game music no longer drives you crazy from repetition.

 

Game audio has three main points: music, sound and voice.  Which of those do you think is the most important?

 

GS: Voice is to audio what eyes are to a painting.  You can either use eyes or not use eyes in a painting.  If you use eyes the viewer goes right to it.  Voice is the same way, it grabs your attention, and it has a completely different use from music and sound effects.  A person could technically create a game with any combination of those three types of sound elements.  It's like saying choose a paintbrush or a pencil, we use all of them to create rich content.  You might say use a violin or a guitar.  I can create something nice with either of those, or both, or an iron ocarina forged on my own two hands.

 

Sound effects fall a little bit behind the others in my mind just because they tend to heighten realism.  And it's very tricky to go much beyond that.  They can heighten realism and they can heighten humor.  I think you can get amazing subtlety by using audio but it's very tricky to get a huge effect out of sound effects.  Subtle use of sound effects creates subtle changes in mood--which is very different from what's commonly done ; 40 minutes of the loudest, most intense experience of your life.  From an artistic standpoint that kind of thing is very brutal.  It's like making every painting with the brightest colors or having every instrument turned all the way up.  However, it is our legacy as gamers to believe in more is better.  So we tend toward creating a gaming experience that'll be 40 hours of the most intense experience of your life.  So again it is a paradox.

 

What kind of music is featured on the CDs you've released?

 

GS: To categorize it, the one common element is that the CDs each represent some kind of music that is pretty much unheard of in games.  The three CDs we've got out: one of them is the soundtrack to The Seventh Guest.  Seventh Guest was utterly different from everything else that went before it or anything since.

 

Surf.com is surf music for a communist game show that takes over the country.  Cowboy surf music, Texas surf music for a communist game show.  Pretty unheard of.  It’s the soundtrack to a game called Zhadnost:  The People's Party.  It was an old 3DO game, the sequel to Twisted.

 

The third CD is Flabby Rode.  Most of it consists of songs with lyrics and stuff that was refused from games or was stuck onto a game CD  and released, but never documented.  The slogan for that one is ”Go ahead:  Laugh at the Funny Fat Man.”

 

Do you have any vocals on the CDs?

 

GS: Yes.  7th Guest was the first General MIDI product ever, not counting the hardware.  General MIDI is pretty much what everybody calls MIDI files today, the MIDIs that play back with pretty much the correct instrument playing pretty much the correct parts.  It was also the first game to have a soundtrack included in the package.  And nobody really knew of these CD-Rom things, no one knew what they did.  And when I was told the game was going to come out on CD-Rom, I said is that anything like a CD?  And Graeme Devin, one of the producers of that game who went on to produce games like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, said "Yeah, it's kind of like that."  And I said, "Can you put CD audio on it like a regular CD?"  And he said, "Sure Fat Man."  And I said, "Can I write a 40-minute album of music and produce it with real instruments and put it on there for free and ship it with the game?"  And his response was, "Sure Fat Man, whatever you say."  And we even got a couple of the singing tracks playing in the game.  And I got a fax from the people at Virgin, the publisher, a couple of days before they were going to ship the game saying, "Let's just dump this music, it's too hard to get this thing to work."

 

What is next for you?

 

GS: There's a story in my book...well, I don't want to spoil it for you.  I think you should read my book and figure it out.  That would be a good challenge for you.

 

A secret message, huh?

 

GS: Yeah.

 

Well, what would you say to someone who might not have read the book yet?  What would you say to them, like maybe a hint that would lead them to figure out what you're doing next?

 

GS: There's a story in there about a raccoon named Sammy who writes music for vacuum cleaners.  At the end of the story, even though other raccoons are writing music for vacuum cleaners and are getting a lot of recognition for what they're doing, he ends up writing music for toasters.

 

Haha, that's good!  That could actually be a concept for something within a game.  Maybe a mini-game or something...

 

Thank you for your time.  This was a very interesting interview.

 

GS: Thank you.