Clive Barker's Jericho has just been released, and GameArena has dived head first into the horror with our
review. There's no doubt that we feel it had some hits and some misses, but a definite hit was scored in the audio department. Read on though for an in-depth interview with the team behind the eerie sound effects in Clive Barker's Jericho. Read on to find out the ins and outs of creating music and sound designed to scare you into a new pair of pants. And if you can't get enough of the cheesy lines from the game, we've got a
ringtone pack available for download as well!
Answering the questions:
Jethro Dunn
Sound Designer
John Davies
Sound Designer
Olly Johnson
Sound Designer
Andy Grier
Sound Designer
Adam Sawkins
Audio Programming Consultant
How important is sound and music in producing a horror game, and in particular Jericho?
Andy: Just like blockbuster films, audio in computer games can be used to reinforce on and off-screen action, stimulating strong feelings and suggestion through the power of the music, and also evoking emotional responses from the player through character dialogue and creative sound design. In any game the sound has to reflect the situation and environment the player is in, which is all very well for realistic games - a car game should sound like you’re driving a real car, a war game should sound like you’re in a real war - but who’s to say what an environment should sound like when you’re standing inside something which is unknown to us such as a cave in Jericho. The walls and floors are covered with skin from the souls of the Innocent and blood of God. What should these walls sound like? Do we hear the sound of blood & guts squelching as we walk through dark passageways, or perhaps even the screaming voices of distant innocent souls, longing for release from their flesh ridden prison walls? God’s first creation before Adam & Eve, the Firstborn, appears in a cloud of flies and begins to speak. Should it sound male/female, young/old? Obviously no one actually knows for real, so that’s where we start our process of creating unique and distinctive sounds that hopefully trigger some uncomfortable responses from the player
In a horror game, we make full use of the audio to essentially mess with the player’s mind, drawing them into the game, creating unnerving atmospheres for exploring, building tension, and then finally, scaring the crap out of them! Spielberg has always said that audio is 50% of the entertainment experience and with Jericho, there’s no exception. There are many dark sections in the game, where the audio is the primary element leading you through to the light at the end of that very scary tunnel. Try playing it with the sound off if you don’t believe me…
Olly: The great thing about horror is that you can really go to town on the audio, it’s an abnormal situation in Jericho so we could add lots of sounds that are there purely to add to the overall atmosphere, suggesting what “might” be around the corner to make you cautious about your next move.
Sometimes in Jericho there are sections where the audio really builds the tension, take for example the Crusader Tombs, alongside Cris Velasco’s haunting music there are distant cries of the women and children that were enslaved and trapped, to hear something like this is very upsetting in a primitive way, there’s not many people that will feel comfortable when hearing such disturbing sounds. But you soon forget about that when the Child Crusaders are screaming at you trying to tear your head clean off, let rip on them with Delgado’s Minigun!
Jericho isn’t just a horror game, at its very core it’s also an action game. One of the things we really strived to do was to make sure that when you are firing weapons that could blow your head off that it sounds violent and satisfying to pull the trigger, you really don’t want weak weapons when faced with an angry cultist. If the weapons sounded weak or if they all sounded the same then I believe the game would have been a lot less fun to play.
John: We were very lucky on Jericho to have some highly talented voice actors to work with on monster sounds. Some of the things those guys can do with their vocal chords just shouldn’t be possible.
Did Clive Barker have an input into the sound? What was it like working with him?
Olly: Clive’s vision extended beyond the visuals and the story, he knows what scares people better than most, so all his suggestions went into the game in some form, from tiny ambient effects to how he imagines what burning babies sound like!
John: Clive had a very clear vision of what he wanted put into the game. Clive would often review builds of the game as it went through production. His passion for producing the atmosphere and style of the game audio was always evident in the feedback he gave where he would enthuse about the things he liked and berate the things he didn’t. The results speak for themselves, Jericho is a highly atmospheric game that really reflects the signature of a Clive Barker horror. The best thing about working with Clive is that he knows what he wants, and he has a good understanding of the medium that helps him explain what his vision is to us as sound designers.
Andy: Some of Clive’s direction really strayed away from the norm, but this is what helped turn Jericho into such an unusual sounding game. Environmental areas weren’t meant to sound wholly realistic. Clive wanted the hurricane at the start of the game to have a voice - a distinct soul screaming across Al-Khali. Set-piece objects were treated similarly. The Blood Door outside Muriel Green’s bunker was designed to literally groan with pain as it is forced open by Church’s magic unbinding. Clive was aware that the sound design of objects such as these was vital into giving the world of Jericho a life of its own.
There are loads of weird, horrible sounds in the game. How did you come up with them?
Olly: Back to the burning babies! Scattered throughout the levels are these gore torches, human torsos, limbs and various body parts skewered on stakes burning away, there was a suggestion that they should sound like burning babies, hearing the fat pop and sizzle. Thankfully we could improvise with sausages and camp fires to get the required sound.
In coming up with some of the sounds, we really pushed our voice talent with some unusual requests. One of our voice actors did a mighty fine Pig in pain squeal, on hearing it I couldn’t quite believe it came from a human throat. This was used in the Behemoth battle. The Behemoth is a half machine, half meat pate monster that spews blood and guts at you. It really is quite grim but I had a lot of fun making the sounds for the Behemoth and it’s probably my favourite Monster in the game, you can hear loads of machinery, pigman screams and lots of really grisly squelches and stomach rumbles just as it vomits yesterday’s dinner all over you. When it roars I’m hoping that at least one pair of pants gets totally written off, if we manage that then it’s a success.
Because the visuals are so grim the audio team really needed to make sure our audio was just as vile. Another particular highpoint is Vicus, when he opens his stomach to attack we’ve added the most grisly disgusting sound we could come up with, it sounds like he has to break his rib cage every time… I’m surprised I ate anything at all whilst working on Jericho.
Jethro: Although a lot of the monsters were voiced by actors, some of them were also done by various members of the Codies Audio Department. This basically involved shouting grunting and gasping into a microphone until our throats literally gave out and then processing the results to fit. You can hear me grunting as a mutated soldier in the WWII levels and as the ghostly voice of the fire demon Ababanilli as he idles around Delgado’s arms. It certainly made a change from recording voice-overs for sports games and it made interesting listening for anyone walking past our offices.
John: Sound design always involves a bit of abstract thinking when it comes to creating creatures, especially in a horror game like Jericho. There’s a whole menagerie of animals in there mixed in with some great voice acting and some gory gloopy foley sounds. From Hyenas to angry badgers there’s all manner of things in there.
Andy: … and mating penguins.
Olly: We promised never to mention that…
Some of the voice work is really scary – what sort of talent did you work with? What were your briefs to them?
Andy: Most of the squad voice talent was recorded across in the States via Outsource Media and Technicolor. Clive was involved with the casting and approval of the voice work, and as a result we ended up with a great cast with main characters voiced by well-known voice actors including James Horan, Steven Jay Blum, Kimberly Brooks, Jim Cummings, Cindy Robinson and Michele Specht. Before the recording sessions, we worked with MSE to implement an integral speech system which would dynamically react to player circumstances. At the recording stage, we then recorded each in-game phrase 3 times, but at different intensities; whispered, normal and shouting. These were then fed into the game, which calls the appropriate phrase with relevant tone dependant on game state. So if you see Suicide Cultists round a corner, you are able to whisper to Alpha squad to ‘take point’ at the other side of a zone. Whereas, if you give an order whilst in the midst of a full-on monster-frenzy, your squad members will be literally shouting those same commands, above the noise of gun fire and screaming Cultist taunts.
Jethro: Most of the monster voice talent was recorded for us by Technicolor in the US using Dee Bradley Baker. Dee has created voices for many games over the past 10 years, most notable in recent times for Gears of War and Halo 3. We also did quite a few of the monsters in-house using willing volunteers and ourselves. Andy and I ripped our vocal chords on some of the 2-headed soldiers, John laid his manly voice to some of the tortured victims strew throughout the game, and Olly became a Legionary for the day.
Why did Clive Barker choose Cris Velasco, and what did his score bring to the project? How does the music change as the player goes through the game?
Jethro: Cris was Clive’s personal choice to score the game – they are fans of each other’s work. There’s a lot of unusual instrumentation and avant-garde composition techniques in there. He mixes more traditional western orchestral composition with unfamiliar musical intervals, instrumentation and emotive choral vocalisations. Music is the key to putting you on edge or at ease. A good example of this is the beautiful Firstborn Theme which appears whenever the firstborn does, often in juxtaposition to aggressive combat music. There’s an interview with Cris that goes into a bit more detail about this on Music4Games.net.
Olly: The great thing about the music in Jericho (and Jericho in general) is the way that each chapter is a different period in time, allowing for great variety in the type of music you will hear.
What sort of influences go into the sound on Jericho? What was the atmosphere you wanted to create?
Olly: We were influenced by lots of different things from films like Aliens to games with big boss battles and quiet eerie moments like Resident Evil 4. I actually made Jethro watch a particularly nasty scene from a Korean film called Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance where the “hero” takes a baseball bat to someone’s head…repeatedly.
I remember first hearing the sound when his skull finally gives up, it honestly made me feel ill, you don’t even see the damage on screen. That’s the beauty of audio; sometimes you can just provide the sound and let the mind make up the rest, with often more disturbing results.
Now, when you play Jericho again headshot one of the cultists and you will hear Jethro’s quite grisly sound. It’ very satisfying, and in a quite worrying way I think this horrible sound rewards the player for getting the headshot in, well it satisfies me anyway, but then I am obscenely good at headshots in Jericho, Emilio at MSE was well impressed by my sniping skills. I’m a big fan of Black, she’s my first choice character every time.
I’m a massive fan of Akira Yamoaka, the genius behind the Silent Hill SFX and music, so personally a lot of the reason why I started out in this industry was because of his work and now I’ve had the chance to work on a game that I can say is truly horrific and allowed massive scope to create a disturbing atmosphere.
Jethro: Yeah, definitely Mr. Vengeance for the skull-pop sound… that was fun. Jurassic Park for the stomping feet of the Corpse Behemoth. Gargoyles (90’s cartoon) and Batman for Arnold Leach’s wings. Poltergeist II for the screaming Wind of Doom in the opening levels. Most of these sort of things have a reference in Hollywood movies that people are familiar with, although sometimes it’s good to subvert that familiar reference and do something different. The Blood-Sigil sealed bunker door makes a great sound which is quite far away from your standard “door opening in a game” sound. As a sound designer you become acutely aware of a lot of the standard sample-library sounds that are used in films and games so you have to try and get away from those sounds whilst still maintaining that frame of reference for the listener.
Andy: We worked very closely with MSE’s in-house sound designer, Emilio Gutiérrez López, producing content over FTP/MSN, then implementing the assets across all platforms. Adam, Olly & myself also spent 5 weeks across in Madrid working closely with the dev team to make sure we implemented as much gut-wrenching audio as we could before the game was released. Whilst in Madrid, we found ourselves approaching the project in a slightly different manner than we had previously - speaking face to face with level designers, programmers & artists about the finer details of Jericho’s character & level design. They gave us a lot of ideas and inspiration that would have not been possible if we had worked remotely from sunny Warwickshire.
John: Games are a very different medium to films and fortunately Clive understood this well. As audio designers in games our job is not only to immerse the player in an environment but also to help the game interact with them. Audio is great for attracting a player’s attention to a particular area or making them feel uneasy in an area that otherwise looks innocent. Though just like films we indulge in the odd cheap trick to make the player jump out of their skin when they least expect it, but then, isn’t that what scary games are for?
How was it working on a next-generation console? Did you use any new techniques or technologies that weren’t possible before?
Adam: lt’s a real pleasure working on next gen consoles. You have a huge amount of RAM to play with, and better compression. This gives you the opportunity to come a lot closer to film-quality sounds. To give you an idea of the improvement, most PS2 games have less than 90 seconds of audio ready to play at any given time. Jericho often has 30 megabytes or more (depending on the level) – given the aggressive compression ratios we use, this can mean over 2 hours of audio, ready to play at any point. That’s over 80 times better!
We also get the luxury of proper DSP (Digital Signal Processing) and reverb effects. On the PS2, you could simply pick ‘Cathedral’, ‘Pipe’, ‘Canyon’, etc – on the 360, you get complete control over all aspects of the reverb, giving a much more realistic sound than was previously possible. We also used a low-pass filter on the game sound, linked to large impacts, your health, and special cut-scene moments, so as you begin to drop near death, your hearing becomes more and more muffled. This was a technique I had previously used on Black on the PS2 – the difference is that on next -gen consoles, it’s free, as opposed to using a lot of CPU time! As we become more familiar with the power of these new consoles, we will be pushing the audio envelope further and further, to the point where it’s every bit as good as a top Hollywood production.
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