TOPCast 65: Dan Forden

TOPCast - This Old Pinball·podcast_episode·1h 19m·analyzed·Feb 21, 2010

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Dan Forden recounts pinball sound design career 1989-2003, Yamaha FM synthesis, CVSD speech codec challenges.

Summary

Dan Forden, a legendary sound engineer who worked at Williams/Bally and Stern from 1989 to 2003, discusses his early career in pinball sound design. He describes his path from computer music studies at Oberlin and Northwestern to joining Williams, his work with the Yamaha FM sound chip and CVSD speech codec, and specific games including Atlantis, Black Knight 2000, Bad Cats, Roller Games, and others. The interview covers technical audio production methods, hardware constraints, and the collaborative creative process.

Key Claims

Dan Forden was a sound engineer for Bally, Williams, and Stern from 1989 to 2003
high confidence · Podcast introduction and Dan's interview about his career timeline
Atlantis was Dan's first pinball game; Robin Seaver did the music and most sounds while Dan helped
high confidence · Dan states 'I did a number of sound effects for that I think Robin Seaver did the music and most of the sounds and I was helping out'
Arch Rivals arcade game was actually Dan's first project at Williams before Atlantis
high confidence · Dan clarifies 'I think the actual first thing I worked on my got there was actually archribals the arcade basketball game'
Chris Granner was a sound designer at Williams who worked on Elvira with speech limitations due to the CVSD chip
high confidence · Dan says 'I remember Chris Granner telling me about the Elvira game where she supposed to say let's party and you could never hear anything other than let party'
Brian Schmidt was the lead sound designer on Black Knight 2000 and created tools/editors for the Yamaha FM chip
high confidence · Dan: 'Brian Schmidt came in as the head of the sound department... he worked on Space Shuttle... Black Knight 2000... Brian I believe Brian and maybe someone in Bill Parade one of them or both of them worked on an editor'
The Yamaha FM chip had 8 voices, an 8-bit DAC for drum samples, and a CVSD chip for speech
high confidence · Dan describes the hardware: 'eight voice Yamaha chip an eight-bit DAC so you could play an eight-bit drum sample one at a time'
CVSD chip had a frequency response up to 2500 Hz, making sibilants like 'S' and 'F' sound identical
high confidence · Dan explains 'it was a beast to work with... frequency response of up to maybe 2500 hertz so S's and F's basically sounded the same'
Steve Richie was the demanding designer on Black Knight 2000 who wrote the multiball riff
high confidence · Dan: 'Steve's Steve's pretty demanding game designer... Steve actually wrote a riff for the multi-ball tune'

Notable Quotes

“I actually grew up in Maryland and you know sort of take it way back. I remember during junior high and maybe high school going into Rockville and going to the little arcade they had in the mall there and playing Flash and Superman”
Dan Forden @ Early in interview — Establishes Dan's early arcade exposure in the mid-to-late 1970s and formative gaming experiences
“Brian just said look just give me a demo of a rock tune a spy tune and a country tune and I kind of got it at that point it's like okay they want idioms like stuff that's familiar that's gonna you know bring up kind of familiar feelings and settings not this abstract stuff that I was doing on my own”
Dan Forden @ Discussing hiring process at Williams — Key insight into Williams' design philosophy valuing familiar, evocative sounds over experimental music
“I think I like them both I thought it was harder I think it was definitely harder to create sound for pinball machines because it was a lot more abstract I mean you're trying you know I'm trying to make a sound well also because we're using a Yamaha chip to make all the sounds it's not like I could sample water”
Dan Forden @ Comparing pinball vs arcade sound design — Explains the unique creative challenge of FM synthesis-based pinball sound vs. sampled arcade audio
“you could also in the score itself you had access to all the parameters of the voice so I could load in a voice and then as part of the music I could I could change parameters on the fly right so if I wanted to do like more of a feedback thing I could like change some modular so some modulator or carrier ratio in in the middle of the music”
Dan Forden @ Discussing FM synthesis capabilities — Shows the sophisticated real-time parameter manipulation capabilities available in Williams' sound system
“I remember Chris Granner telling me about the Elvira game where she supposed to say let's party and you could never hear anything other than let party because the ass on the end of that just wouldn't speak no matter how hard you know and we try to turn up that part of the digital file”
Dan Forden @ Discussing CVSD speech codec limitations — Illustrates the severe frequency response limitations of the CVSD chip and frustrations in speech synthesis

Entities

Dan FordenpersonChris GrannerpersonBrian SchmidtpersonSteve RichiepersonRobin SeaverpersonMark RichiepersonWilliams ElectronicscompanyBally ManufacturingcompanyStern Pinballcompany

Signals

?
design_philosophy: Williams prioritized familiar, evocative sound idioms (rock, spy, country) that created emotional context over experimental/abstract computer music; Dan learned this through failed audition demo and later successful callbacks
high · Brian Schmidt's directive: 'give me a demo of a rock tune a spy tune and a country tune... they want idioms like stuff that's familiar that's gonna... bring up kind of familiar feelings and settings not this abstract stuff'
?
technology_signal: Williams pinball sound systems used multi-layered hardware: 8-voice Yamaha FM chip + 8-bit DAC for drum samples + CVSD codec for speech; real-time parameter manipulation via text-based score compiler and editor tool
high · Dan describes complete signal flow: FM chip for instruments, DAC for drums, CVSD for speech, with parameter control accessible both in editor and during music playback
?
product_concern: CVSD codec had severe frequency response limitation (2500 Hz max), making high-frequency consonants indistinguishable; sibilants S/F sounded identical; speech intelligibility suffered especially with background audio
high · Dan: 'frequency response of up to maybe 2500 hertz so S's and F's basically sounded the same... Elvira game... let's party... you could never hear anything other than let party'
?
design_innovation: Dan developed electric guitar FM synthesis sounds that handled both power chords and screaming lead tones on 8-voice Yamaha chip; Steve Richie wrote multiball riff specifically for this synthesized guitar
high · Dan: 'I cranked away for a while eventually came up with something that I liked... good both for doing for trying to do power chords and for doing you know screaming lead guitar... Steve actually wrote a riff for the multi-ball tune'

Topics

Sound design and audio engineering for 1980s-1990s pinball machinesprimaryYamaha FM synthesis: technical capabilities, limitations, and creative approachesprimaryCVSD speech codec hardware and its severe frequency response limitationsprimaryCareer path and education leading to pinball sound design workprimaryMemory/EPROM constraints and creative trade-offs in early pinball soundsecondaryCollaborative creative process between sound designers, programmers, and game designerssecondaryWilliams/Bally acquisition and its impact on hiring and sound departmentsecondaryComparison of arcade video game vs pinball sound design challengesmentioned

Sentiment

positive(0.75)— Dan speaks fondly of his pinball career, the games he worked on, and the creative challenges. He expresses enthusiasm about early games and appreciation for collaborators like Chris Granner and Brian Schmidt. Some frustration noted about CVSD chip limitations and memory constraints, but presented as technical challenges overcome rather than bitter complaints. Overall nostalgic and appreciative tone.

Transcript

whisper_import · $0.000

Welcome to Topcast. Topcast is the this old pinball podcast for all things related to pinball. Our emphasis is on interviewing pinball personalities, particularly those that work in the coin-operated game industry. Define Topcast on the internet, just point your browser to pinrepair.com. Slash Topcast, and you will find all of our shows which are available in podcast format for download. Our podcasts are also available through Apple's iTunes if you're using an iPod type MP3 device. Tonight on Topcast we're going to be talking to Dan Fordon who is the sound engineer for Balli and Williams and also for Stern on many games from 1989 up to 2003. So we're going to be giving Dan a call and talk to him about the games that he worked on. Okay so I've got Dan Fordon on the line. Dan tell me about your early days with pinball. You know you were obviously sound engineer but how did you come to this point where you were working in the pinball industry? I mean did you have a you know like an early memory of pinball or did it just kind of like trip into this business? Yeah I did kind of trip into it. It was sort of being in the right place at the right time. I actually grew up in Maryland and you know sort of take it way back. I remember during junior high and maybe high school going into Rockville and going to the little arcade they had in the mall there and playing Flash and Superman and I think Paragon, a bunch of games like that and then you know that's when space wars had just come out and I think probably space invaders was in there maybe Asteroid. So like this is back in the mid to late 70s and so I thought you know I thought that was pretty cool and then you know as I you know went through high school probably didn't go back that much but then during college you know played some video here and there but didn't really like make any sort of you know I wasn't obsessed by it I didn't you know do it all the time but you know once in a while in passing I would play arcade games and pinball if it was available. So fast four a couple years I ended up in in Evanston going to Northwestern University for a master's in computer music which I never actually got but I did all the coursework and I knew a number of people that were working for Williams that's what it was at the time and they were doing obviously pinball machines and arcade video games and then one of the people actually so I finished the coursework and then I was actually doing some apprenticing in a recording studio around the same time but needed to get a job and I actually interviewed with Valley over that summer and sort of the agreement we had I mean we sort of you know we hit it off they wanted they were very interested in having me come on as a sound engineer because I also had some programming experience too so I could presumably create sound as well as help out with some of the programming maybe do some tools for the sound department that kind of thing and so we were we sort of had an agreement in principle that once I finished my thesis from a master's degree that I would go work for Valley and I had an interview I think around the same time with Williams that for every incident just didn't go great it's like I don't think I hit it off with the people there as well and then of course Williams actually bought Valley so I wasn't sure what I was going to do at that point I went ahead and kept kind of pestering them and by this time I believe so I knew Chris Granner who had been working at Williams and a couple other people there and then Brian Schmidt came in as the head of the sound department and I guess I don't know if you guys remember he worked on Space Shuttle and a number of other games he did a lot of stuff with Black Knight 2000 I think he might have done Bond's I run as well so he was running so I knew him from the Northwestern computer music program and so I basically this one was kind of pestering them and so at one point I think I gave them a demo tape that I'd made and it was all my weird computer music stuff and I was in a band at the time and we did this kind of sort of aggressive funk rock stuff that just did not you know leave a good impression on the people that were you know that were designing the games and would you know make the decision on hiring me so finally Brian just said look just give me a demo of a rock tune a spy tune and a country tune and I kind of got it at that point it's like okay they want idioms like stuff that's familiar that's gonna you know bring up kind of familiar feelings and settings not this abstract stuff that I was doing on my own so I want to work and did that and submitted that and they really liked it and so that would eventually got me hired and so I started in you know figuring out the systems there playing a lot of games because they were games sitting around in the hall and you know the the latest game and development is sitting there I remember exactly which one it was and maybe the one that was just coming off the line that they were that they were finishing production on I remember I played a lot of taxi in the beginning there so just kind of learning by playing the games and you know learning you know what what what what did Chris do to make a pinball machine pinball machine sound good and what are other people you know what Brian do to make a pinball machine sound but just sort of learn by playing and and experiencing it that way and then starting to work with the designers you know what do you want for the game what kind of music and what kind of sounds you know what's the what's the theme of the game and so on and so on so I mean that's sort of kind of a meandering tale but that's pretty much how I ended up doing you know working for the for the pinball machine industry and working on video games as well. Where did you go to school for your undergraduate and what did you get your undergraduate in? I went to Oberlin College near near Cleveland at smaller liberal arts school also as a conservatory of music and I originally tried to get in there as a flute player to do performance and I didn't get in but I was able to continue studying flute with one of the faculty there and did that for a couple years I ended up with a music degree from the college in other words I could you could get a I got a bachelor of arts in music history and so I studied a lot of music at Oberlin but I also branched out study literature studied math study computer science and then got into computer music there for a small place they actually actually had and for the time they had a pretty advanced computer music department and so learned I learned a lot about you know what you can what you could do with computers and sound in that context and then I actually went on and and was it I got a sort of half scholarship to go to graduate school at MIT for one year and I went there for year and then eventually transferred back to or transferred over to Northwestern. Now when you were doing the computer work in college what type of computers were you using? It was all mainframe at that time I think Vax VMS were the computers we worked on at Oberlin at least it was all mainframe so you'd have like a room with a bunch of terminals in it and I think using the word star word processor I think and we also learned you know I learned Fortran I learned Pascal learned assembly language I think with Vax VMS assembler and then we did more sort of theoretical stuff it was a language called scheme which is a lot like Lisp which I guess it's not really object oriented but it's just a very different kind of programming language looks completely different than anything you know like C or anything like that then I kind of taught myself C which is very similar to Pascal when I was at MIT. Now but I mean when you were doing music on the computers what type of computers were using to do that? Yeah so in the beginning the instructor there had created basically sort of a virtual frequency modulation instrument and I need to go into details but frequency modulation is a sort of synthesis strategy for creating sound that's very efficient using only two you know using two you can use more but you can use two oscillators to create a very complex spectra and that's actually the basis of the DX7 which is the first digital synthesizer to come out on the market so this was actually right before that in any case so we had this this he had set up an environment where you could enter you could design you could design instruments using this sort of pre-fab algorithm and then you could generate scores basically matrixes of of you know note duration pitch data and things like that and you could you know write a piece that way the funny thing was that you would actually have to batch the job off and it would go on to like a tape somewhere and run overnight and like in the next day you come back and hear your two minute the music it was kind of funny and then after that I think my junior year this is when the Yamaha DX7 had come out the school bought a bunch of those and they also had a bunch of micro computers and so we were getting into programming the synthesizer in real time from the computer I don't remember what kind of computer was actually now when you went to when you went to Williams Valley how was the development environment there I mean you know you're using you're using a Yamaha sound chip on these sound boards and assembly language to drive it I mean how how was the environment on that compared it to the college thing it was I would say a lot more evolved and it was kind of home brew at the same time we had a language that I feel what it's called well there there was like a compiler that would take we would write scores in basically like a text file you know note c3 comma 4 is you know play c3 for 4 ticks or beats or whatever and you know you you would lay out your eight tracks sort of on top of each other and just program it that way by text you know you could create loops you would have rests and then that would get compiled into the assembler for the for the board that we used on the development systems which is basically what was in the games at that time and I had a pin ball machine cabinet and on the play field was all this this development hardware that kind of emulated the hardware that ultimately would get shipped in the game and so I'd have a PC I think I started out with a 286 and like a compact or HP or something like that that was hooked up to this you know the RS 232 to this development hardware and so the computer we know we'd run the compiler it would it would do its thing and then and then stuff the stuff that we made into some onboard RAM onto the development hardware and then I could basically talk to that through a program that communicated out the port to the hardware and I could make the sound calls happen so you you didn't have an actual pinball machine that had this kind of like RAM in your PC that was accessible by the pinball instead it was this developmental hardware and you could you could trigger each one of the sounds without having to like play the game right correct okay and and so you never really actually had a machine in your office you were always using this kind of developmental platform right okay okay now so according to the internet pinball database your first game was Atlantis how much of the sound did you do for Atlantis I did a number of sound effects for that I think Robin Seaver did the music and most of the sounds and I was helping out and that was like some of the first pinball sounds I did I think the actual first thing I worked on my got there was actually archribals the arcade basketball game oh and how was it working on arc you know like an arcade video game versus a pinball machine or didn't it matter um I don't know I think I like them both I thought it was harder I think it was definitely harder to create sound for pinball machines because it was a lot more abstract I mean you're trying you know I'm trying to make a sound well also because we're using a Yamaha chip to make all the sounds it's not like I could sample water and and that would be sort of a characteristic sound of the game I had to like you know try to make it work with with a Yamaha FM sound with a basketball game where you're seeing people go back and forth the connection between what you hear and see is a lot more explicit so they sort of automatically kind of work together and I remember having a hard time making stuff for Atlantis and people thinking that you know people saying you know those sounds aren't any good and I was like well okay I don't know what I'm doing so I just kept trying different things and you know playing other games and trying to figure out well what is you know what is cool about that that's not cool about the thing that I was doing now if you needed to sample or or get a digital you know version of a voice or something hot how did they do that I mean I understand how you were constructing your scores and playing your music and you had certain and with the Yamaha chip you had certain voices or certain instruments as they may call them but I mean how would you like to you know you know speech right so we had the first hardware that we used when I was there with the eight voice Yamaha chip an eight-bit DAC so you could play an eight-bit drum sample one at a time and actually I don't think even I don't think Atlantis even had that I know our rivals did not have it so like doing things like drums I had to do drums on you know take up one or two tracks on my on my on my FM track FM score to do the drums those were our rivals and I believe Atlantis is the same thing and so so you got the eight voice Yamaha chip you got the the eight-bit DAC and we had the CVSD chip which I don't know if people know about that but it it was a beast to work with and it was basically one let's see I think it was like an eight-to-one compression it had a frequency response of up to maybe 2500 hertz so S's and F's basically sounded the same and if you could get them to speak at all and the way it worked I think it was like sort of one bit per sample so if the incoming signal was higher than the previous sample then the bit would be a one if the incoming sample is lower than the previous one then the bit would be a zero and that's basically how it encoded it and I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that but that was my understanding of it and so that's what we had to work with and so we had to do all sorts of crazy EQ stuff before we converted it just to try to get anything that had high frequency to speak but I remember Chris Granner telling me about the Elvira game where she supposed to say let's party and you could never hear anything other than let party because the ass on the end of that just wouldn't speak no matter how hard you know and we try to turn up that part of the digital file as much as we could and still it just wouldn't convert so that was always very frustrating but challenging so after the Lannis you did Black Knight 2000 where you're a little more experienced that things go a little easier? Yes and no I mean I still had to make some demanding you know Steve's Steve's pretty demanding game designer so I had to make it you know make him happy and you're talking about Steve Ritchie of course right? Yes and Brian Schmidt was actually he was the lead on that game and he did most of it but what he asked me to do was see if I could come up with like electric guitar sound on the Yamaha and so I cranked away for a while eventually came up with something that I liked pretty well that I felt like was good both for doing for trying to do power chords and for doing you know screaming lead guitar type stuff and Steve actually wrote a riff for the multiball tune yeah I think that was the one and so he gave me that riff and so I took that and used my my electric guitar and you know tried to make like a cooking like heavy metal screaming lead guitar tune for multiball and that was that was a ton of fun to do and I was thinking the whole time it's like well what would I don't know Steve I was even around at the time but it was like what was something like that play what would I even have play over you know something like this and of course you know people like that can like come up with it in the moment I like spent you know a couple days writing you know going note for note and trying to do these all sorts of guitar like gestures with this kind of unwieldy Yamaha a voice chip but it was a ton of fun to try to make it work and I'm pretty happy with the way it came out yeah no I came out great but I guess how do you how do you develop these voices I mean like you know for me I've obviously never worked with this hardware I mean how do you get a particular sound or are the sounds pretty much already dictated by the chip no um Brian I believe Brian and maybe someone in Bill Parod one of them or both of them worked on an editor that was able to actually talk to the chip and it allowed to to manipulate the parameters of the chip so we could change um I don't know like modulator amounts and frequencies and you know LFO and and all the all the synth all all the internal synth parameters of that FBO1 chip we would we would have have control over and what was actually really cool was that not only just like oh so so I would go in and and to this editor and I would like play notes and tweak the the parameters until I got something that I'd liked but you could also in the score itself you had access to all the parameters of the voice so I could load in a voice and then as part of the music I could I could change parameters on the fly right so if I wanted to do like more of a feedback thing I could like change some modular so some modulator or carrier ratio in in the middle of the music and it would make it would affect a timbre change I did a ton of that in um Brian of Pinbuck and that was a lot of fun so you had eight tracks is that mean you had like eight separate instruments that you could play simultaneously right single note see oh you mean so it would play one instrument one note but it would do it so quickly that it would wouldn't sound that way right well like for example like maybe the let's say that multiball tune um for black night I would maybe have a bass line might take up two tracks because like we would often double a line to make it fatter right a little bit of coursing a little detune maybe tiny bit of delay and then maybe I'd have three voices for doing like a rhythm guitar um and maybe let's see like a symbol and then maybe the lead guitar would then be another two tracks doubled so you but it would be something like that so you had a full you had a full line of effects too with it with it too you had coursing and delay all available with the chip too no you had to you could you could simulate that but you'd use up like like one thing I like to do was um like on all eight tracks let's say I don't want to do like a hit um I would just like do the hit and then on each track um you know let let that note ring and then turn the volume down do it again turn the volume down again so it would be kind of like a fake echo fake reverb but no we had no we had no outboard effects or anything like that if we wanted to course something you had to use two voices and detune it and and was that easy to just play with two voices slightly detune and that's your coursing is it was that easy to do in the um in the text file out of there yeah I mean that's just like you know copy that entire track pasted and then at the top do like a pitch change oh interesting okay so now like let's take the next game that you did was bad cats so you've got these cats you know you know in some parts of the game you've got cat and cat noises that are really high pitched now how did you handle something like that um gosh I don't remember I think I just you know where it was appropriate for cats to to make their noises I think I I guess I must have recorded some cats I don't got I don't even remember that I do remember the music for that when that was a lot of fun also to try to do basically jazz and you know someone would based on the lead guitar sound that I that I made I made what was basically going to end up being my tenor saxophone sound and um yeah I'm just trying to do like you know lounge and or like let's let's call it pseudo lounge or pseudo big band jazz in that one and then like some of it kind of had like a hip hop group of not hip hop but like um I don't know what the groove is but like a very like kind of modern swinging sound I guess that's the best way I could describe it now when you need to actually get a to get a voice like you know you were talking about Elvira in the party monsters where she says let's party but you know like I I have that game and I and I I swear I can hear the S in Letz how did the how did you actually accomplish that or or was it it might just like you fake did enough that I think I hear it well I think it was you know with again that was Chris's game and he um I think maybe he had done it a couple times and people were amazing it just sounds like let party and so he just had to keep iterating on it and eventually got it to where it's like yeah and maybe depend on what part of the game like if there's something else loud playing and she says that you might not hear it I just don't I don't remember uh what the context of that is but that's that was just I just remember him talking about how frustrating it was like to not be able to get that to speak the way he wanted it to so was that traditional for you guys to use like almost like camouflage in the background to kind of like in order to make things you know not as noticeable um it depends right I mean if that was like a situation where it's like her voice is like the only thing there then you know there's no way you can camouflage you just have to like play it and that's you know that's what's going to sound um in fact the background background sounds made it hard a lot harder to understand um the speech because um there's so much frequency information missing from the speech from that chip that anything else playing at the same time is going to make it harder to understand all right now um uh you you also did mouse and around um in in a roller games was there was any interesting you know sound stories related to those games um those are both really fun to do although I got to say I thought the roller games was like probably the worst license ever it was a really fun game right now that was I thought that was just a ton of fun to play now did you do the theme for roller games yeah that was an interesting story actually that was the roller game theme that was sort of dictated to us and um and so that's that's one of those games like I think um black nine two thousand was the first one that actually did this that had singing in the game and how would you do that how do you get how do you get singing okay so you would have a track I assume it was like sort of double duty um instrument track and signal track and then the signal track was able to send something to the hardware to play the appropriate sample I mean they had worked out the communication where um you could send a a signal in one of the Yamaha tracks that would turn the CVSD chip on and play the right file so that's what they did in black nine two thousand the same thing we did for roller games and so I ended up with like a couple different um singing files that had the rock and uh you know the roller games little pieces of the roller games vocals and then I would trigger them at the right time did the same thing I believe with river boat gambler had Mark Ritchie singing river boat gambler now you talked about this CVSD chip before so I mean what is that what is CVSD what exactly is that chip it's it stands for a continuously variable slope detection and that it's just basically a standard part of the you know up until we up until Matt Booty created the DCS system that was how we well access not entirely true I think we used an okey chip for a couple of games that had an 80 pcm algorithm which was a ton better but up until that time the CVSD chip for a couple years was how we did it was basically the way we would handle speech in games and it was you know it was not just pinball it was the video games that we were doing and it was also the shuffle alley games that you know we do a couple of those every year too what would be the procedure like it you had Mark Ritchie singing in a river boat gambler so you you would start you go to the studio you record him and how would this ultimately get turned into this into this CVSD and ultimately you know get played back on the hardware give me the whole procedure so what I would do what I probably did is I got the music to a place where it was ready to for somebody to sing over and I assume I recorded that just into a wave file or whatever we were using at the time and then we had a little recording studio with a vocal booth and a control room and I probably gosh I don't even know if I did that I might have done it I'm like a tape recorder who knows but eventually I recorded his voice into and I think this might have been before pro tools I know we had some kind of digit design mac based digital audio recorder I believe we recorded it into that and then I maybe did a little bit of editing on it and then we had this basically a proprietary piece of hardware which was like the CVSD and coder and so you would take the equivalent of a wave file I don't even know if it was at that point we might have had the down sample or down degraded down into 8 bit maybe at some particular sample rate as well anyway then you would basically I think play this file into the CVSD box and it would record it as CVSD data I believe that's how we did it and it's going back away so I don't like my memory is a little bit sketchy on that but that sounds like what I ended up doing and then either I would like play like a vocal phrase and then that would become a file and then I'd play the next vocal phrase that would become a file a CVSD file and then I would bring that over to my computer and do whatever I had to do to compile it into the game naming it accordingly so that when I called for it either from a sound call or from my piece of music that it would play at the right time now that answer question yeah no that's great I was kind of wonder what the process is I know it's a little geeky of a question but you know it's kind of cool now how would so once you get all these sound calls all laid out what would you hand them out to the game programmer and then he would just call them as as as they so desired or did you have control over this within the game well you know it's a collaborative process right so I would go and I'd work in my office for a while and write it you know if you want to you know sort of the typical way I would start up on a game I mean we we would talk obviously you know me and the programmer and the and the game designer and the art lead you know whoever was whoever was interested or had a stake we would discuss you know with the approach we're going to take this is what it should sound like and everyone throws out their ideas and then I kind of go off and and come up with some music you know here's a shooter groove here's a main play tune here's a handful of basic effects like for bumpers for targets drop targets one of the things right by the flippers call it totally forgot slingshots right roll over things like that you know maybe a maybe a lane completion sound that kind of stuff so like your like you're a very basic menu of sounds that would go in the game and so I would come up with that then I would you know print out a thing for the programmer go up you know go to his office and talk about okay this is what you play here put this here put this here you know and you know sometimes they would say well I put this thing on here just because I liked it and that's like you know that was like fine if I you know if I didn't like it I'd probably say I don't like it let's try it something else you know and then I would you know I'd get a bunch of feedback on like what they liked and what they didn't and you know we'd talk about it and then you know it's kind of like at that point now we're kind of in the process of you know creating talking about arguing about it figuring out what's best figuring out what works what's fun you know and then it's just kind of a creative iterative process from then on well did you ever you know all that your sound programs were eventually stored on e-prom was there ever an issue of were you were you just ran out of e-prom space you know at ran out of space to store what you want it to do all the time all the time even today right and I'm doing games for ps3 and xp 360 you got a memory budget you got to make decisions about you know what's worth the memory what's worth the CPU crank you know what can I what can I degrade over here so I can fit this other thing in I mean all the time but I mean was it worse back then or is it worse today I don't know I think it's about the same probably I think it's probably it was probably worse back then I mean come on we're dealing with like I think archriols had like 250k I mean now we're like on you know some of the stuff we're doing now it's like well we've got like 16 megs of memory which doesn't yeah it doesn't even seem all that much today yeah but now we're like yeah but we also have to play you know we have to have room for 10 thousand sounds because that's you know we've got all these characters we've got this music we've got all these you know every character has their own voice you know so I mean the expectations have gone up gone way up as well okay so now you did the sound for for Harley Davis in the Valley Harley Davidson too you know so you you know that's got some motorcycle sounds in that so what was the process to get you know like revving motors or whatever in into the game yeah that was insane someone I forget who designed that game they had no ramps right right it was a it was competing with the Gottlieb street level design which meant that it was kind of a more of a simplistic design game it was a single layer no no have a trails no ramps nothing like that it was a basic game yep so I don't I forget who did it might have been Ward Pemberton maybe or someone had arranged with a Harley dealer out in Palatine which is the suburb of Chicago that I'd go out there and be able to record some of their stuff so I went out there I think I had a may have may have had a dat recorder at that point something like that and so there was a guy who's a Harley guy and he was you know got a bike out and turned it you know turned it on rev to a couple times we did some drive-byes and then we wanted to get some you know steady state engine stuff and so I got on the back of his bike and he didn't wear a helmet and I was like well probably shouldn't wear a helmet either like that would be kind of wissie if I have to wear a helmet and so like holding on like the back with one hand and holding a microphone down by the pipe and he went like 90 miles an hour just like my it was like my land speed record up to that point and like really kind of dumb actually but it was fun it was just not regular streets yeah but were you getting wind noise too yeah we got a lot of wind noise but I was also holding the microphone back and those pipes are super loud I don't remember if I got anything completely useful from that particular part of it and and whether we would have needed that anyway I think the you know some of the best stuff was just the idle at the beginning of the game because that was I was able to get that pretty isolated and there were some drive-byes that were pretty cool that I think I used in like the jackpot or something like that that I thought worked out pretty well all right now the next game up was machine the bride of pinbott now you said you know like who was the woman that that that did the voice calls for that I don't remember her name I was playing in a in a sort of contemporary music ensemble around that time and we were playing this pretty ambitious piece that called for a couple of sopranos to sing along and it was she was one of them and so I just contacted her and had her come in I had written another like okay so there's this one part where she comes alive right I had written a little piece for that originally and brought someone else into sing it and that got that got the thumbs down I said try again so I re-wrote it a little bit made it more like operatic like a little faster notes basically and then got this other singer and that seemed to do the trick now when you got thumbs down was this python that that was given the thumbs down um might have been yeah I think definitely but I think that was probably other people too and it was python pretty demanding to work for compared to the other designers um you know he would be like he would fixate on a couple different things that like you know we're we're very important for him and for his you know for how he saw the game and the important moments but um well for one thing I think I only did music on that game I don't know if I did that many actual sound effects I forget I think John Haye did a bunch of the sound effects and Rich Karstens's recorded a lot of the speech um that actually was one of the was actually Harley Davidson and that were some of the most fun I had writing music for games because I was kind of I mean I was kind of like left to my own devices just do whatever and they seem to like it and so I came up with a main play tune for the bright pinbott and and python really seemed to like it so I think at that point he just kind of let me go and do whatever I wanted to do typically who was the designer that was that let you have them you know the longest leash and who and who had you know who had you on this shortest leash the tough question they were like different at different times like for certain things it's like if it wasn't if it wasn't making it then didn't matter who it was they would let me know and so I'd need to you know rethink it or have a different strategy um Steve's pretty demanding no doubt Steve Ritchie yeah I mean I mostly work with him um mostly him actually I only did one game with Pat Lawler and that was safe cracker which is like you know sort of way late in the whole pinball thing um Brian Eddy he he could be very very specific and very um picky about certain things all right now you also did party zone and get away high speed um you know now party zone was was party zone a pretty you know interesting you know game to do yeah that was a lot of fun and I um I brought like the the captain b's our guy right he's actually someone that um went to my high school back in Maryland that ended up out in Illinois somehow and I sort of reconnected with him and he I just thought he was like the perfect guy to do that voice I think he did a great job now when you brought somebody in like you know the girl you were talking about that did this singing and um and and your buddy from from Maryland did Williams typically pay these people or did they just do it because wow I'm gonna be in a I'm gonna be in a pinball machine that's really cool um they got paid something they didn't get paid that much but it was there was a time when it was like that that it wasn't really cool to like bring someone in and pay them to do this it was sort of uh I don't know because we had done so much of just like oh just get you know whoever down the hall actually we had a lot of we had a number of people that worked there that were really talented like Ed Boone and Mark Ritchie both had gray voices for pinball stuff and they did a ton of stuff for our games so the thinking was like well we've got these people here that can do it why who we pay someone to come in but you know to get a wider variety and actually some real some sort of authentic acting skill you do need to do that and you're gonna raise the production levels of the games and then when we when we went into starting to do movie licenses and now we're getting like Patrick Stewart or you know people from characters from Indie Indiana Jones then you know then it became precedent to get people then that were that actually were really talented voice actors to come in and provide voices for the games now on getaway you know you've got um like a ZZ Top Song in it how how hard was it to create or recreate that using the Yamaha synthesizer voices um well it was you know it's not a super complicated song I remember having a hard time really nailing delete that comes in and I don't think I ever really did just because there's some nuances that they do on the guitar that I just couldn't like make work um I don't know I think it I think it went okay I always felt like I did better like writing my own stuff and trying to cop another tune and make it work in um in sort of pinball land because I did I did I did that tune I did um pinball wizard and rock and roll part three for the um super high impact game it's a song that they often play at half time with basketball games right um you know we licensed that for the super high impact uh football game and I mean they're possible but I don't know I felt more comfortable just writing my own stuff and and because then I could take then I could like write stuff that was I guess more tailored to what the the instruments could do right right yeah you could write stuff that the the hardware could take advantage of instead of kind of reverse engineering songs right and like for example I remember just kind of cringing at the pinball wizard thing because I needed to you know we didn't have singing for it so I had to do the vocal line with an instrument and I just never like I just never felt really comfortable with the way that sounded now you did uh start track next generation and this was a change in hardware you now had the DCS platform maybe we should talk about the development of the DCS platform and and and how big the changes were from um you know from you know a music engineers point of view um it was great um it was what any audio guy would have want would have been wanting for years and uh Matt Booty that was his brainchild and he and an engineer named Ed Keenan work together tirelessly to bring that to light um and it was not without its share of controversy because there are some people that didn't want to use it that didn't want to change and didn't want to take the risk because it was a risk um but you know they persevered and eventually it caught on and people you know who isn't going to want to be able to have orchestral music coming out of their pinball machine I mean that that that kind of thing you know with heart you couldn't hold that down forever um we could actually write what I call real music uh for a change you know with with you know using whatever is out there to make sound you know whether it's a sample library or like the latest synthesizer um all the sudden anything was possible as far as what kind of music you could bring in at the same time it brought a whole new set of challenges because now every piece of music is taking up a discrete chunk of memory whereas before you had an instrument that all you needed was some like really tiny bits of data to make it go now you're actually every piece of sound is using a sample memory and so you know we had to start using a lot more memory and of course the designers are always wanting to put more and more more stuff in the games I mean tons more speech more music you know the games the rules and the games themselves got a lot more complicated so you need just a lot more material so I mean yeah it was cool it was absolutely cool it never wanted to turn back but there was you know you still had the challenge of you know there's all this stuff that I need to get done and this is my finite amount of memory so how do I wedge it in there and so the solution for a lot of it was to start writing you kind of architect the music in a certain way so that you can repeat a section and then have an ending that moves you into the next section and so you write these little modules like little loops basically and then you can string them together in like a kind of like a playlist fashion now what when you said you said there was risks and you said there was some people that didn't want this hardware why you know what were the risks and why would some people not want this because my understanding is is now instead of having like you said having you know a limited number of voices or whatever everything was basically you know converted into like an MP3 format and just you know and basically the hardware hit playback right yeah well okay so I mean it sounds great right but then the realities were as it was being developed I think there was one I think it was I think Indy was the first game that actually used it in fact I think Twilight Zone was going to use it but then didn't so Indy was the first game to use it and so this is like the hardware is in beta the hardware and the software is in beta and it's not totally you know all the kinks aren't worked out and I think Brian Eddy is like sitting in there one night programming is game and the game is quiet nothing's having all the sudden this like you know 90 decibel shriek comes out of the sound system and just scares the pants off and and it's like a horrible like a horrible sound is just coming out of it it's like that kind of thing is like bad PR for trying to you know get your get a new sound system up and running and it's just one of the things that happens along the way obviously you know whatever bug it was was found and it went away but like that made people be like oh I don't want that in my game yeah well you but now you've got voice you know real voice samples I mean and things are really I mean you know you don't have that problem with the S's in the half's anymore at least not to a large degree so I you know I just I can't imagine anybody not wanting that yeah and it well but people right but people's priorities are often you know different and they're used to the way things work you might be introducing a cost element that they don't they don't want yeah I mean like some people have been like extremely successful successful with the old hardware so why you know they're they would be nice but that it's not absolutely necessary for them it just wasn't necessarily a priority and I'm sure there was some politics going on too so like for Star Trek the next generation they did you know you you had the actors actually I guess come in and record these parts I actually flew out to LA and recorded them at a recording session where they were you're familiar with ADR or looping that's the process by which actors will go back into the studio to record the lines that for whatever reason they couldn't use the live audio from the take okay so they'll go in and essentially lip sync their own dialogue so there there was a bunch you know this is in the middle of production for some one of the seasons of the show and so then they all live I'm sure they all live in LA close by and they had over this week of time scheduled them so you know they scheduled to come in and replace their dialogue and so I was able to tag along at the end of those sessions and get them to record the script that we had created for the game now Star Trek the next generation also had a home ROM with some custom speech in it did I mean were they doing this recording at the same time for that too yeah I think once I had recorded my the stuff I needed to get I told them hey you know because I think a lot of them were actually getting a machine out of it that's it hey you can record anything you want and we'll put it in your game until a bunch of them did that in was there different actual different sound robs for different actors I don't think so I think we maybe just made one that had all of it in there and maybe maybe Dwight Sullivan the program he might have programmed it to like just you know for the you know the Patrick Stewart game would play his stuff when you did whatever button combo at the beginning or hit the flipper buttons because I remember there's something simple where you could just cycle through them all right now when this was like a new thing for you to go out and record these these voices of the of the actors on on site I mean was this was this uh I mean was this more fun or was this kind of a track it was fun and scary because you know sort of meeting these extremely popular uh television and movie actors and I didn't want to make a mistake and I didn't want to look stupid so yeah it was kind of scary but it was it was cool it was definitely stressful but it was fun at the same time okay now the next game after Star Trek that you did was pinball circus with python tell me tell me about that game and tell me about the sounds for it um that game was was a lot of fun uh we never finished it um yeah it was it was it was insane I think there was some frustration because it was like I think we kept changing programmers and there was um I don't think there was clear design direction on like where some of the rules were going um but I managed to create you know pieces of music for each level because there are a bunch of different playfields that you would get to um yeah I mean it's just an incomplete right there was although one thing that was really fun about that was I did like a classical guitar piece for I guess it was a trap piece woman or something like that but yeah it just never it never really got out of like an alpha stage I don't think I mean just like it um it never it never really came together it was really cool though so this is a completely you know a non-licensed game a completely original game so you basically got to sit down and write all the music with with whatever instruments you're comfortable with with it was just a lot more work you know it's interesting I actually started that game with the Yamaha system and wrote some stuff and then once we moved over to dcs I re-wrote it with you know because I had you know at that time I was using a k2000 and I had a couple other synths and you know some kind of rudimentary orchestral libraries and things like that so I tried to do sort of orchestral stuff and then like there's a jazz piece for the elephant I think for the z-ry forget and then like this sort of punk rock or heavy metal rock thing for the crazy clown at the very top evil clown guy it was python really doing a nice job with this game in your opinion I don't know I don't it's it seemed like he wasn't completely focused on it and that and I don't really know what happened to it um because it could have been I mean maybe it was just something that was too hard to like really engineer I mean because I think there were there were definitely some issues with what can you actually do with a vertical like a vertically oriented pinball machine like it was I mean maybe there was something about like these really small playfields with small flippers hitting the ball and you can't really keep it in any one place for very long and then it goes I don't know I don't know what the problem was um but I think there were aspects of it this kind of became too difficult to maintain um design direction and probably engineering and hardware okay so now you do the game with with Brian Eddy the shadow um yeah once again did you have to go out and get um and get the actors to get to get their voices and get their voice calls yeah I went out to LA and recorded canelpie and miller and tim curry and john lone I think those were the three and um that was a pretty fun game to do and yeah you know I think he like I think Brian I mean Brian gets like you know he's pretty demanding and we'll like stick to his guns on a lot of stuff but but I felt like he liked you know unbalanced the the music that I wrote you know from the get go and then if there was stuff that he didn't like he would it would be like little aspects of stuff I don't think I ever had to throw anything out with him were you less intimidated by the actors in this movie then you were and say star track yeah I think I sort of I'd already done I don't kind of been there done at that point so it wasn't as that stressful a situation now with no fear how was you know that was a licensed theme but it was kind of like a loose license I mean you had you probably had a lot more space to roam sound wise right yeah um I collaborated with Vince Ponderelli on that game he wrote most of the music I think I wrote maybe main play and gosh maybe a couple of the tunes and then I focused on the speech and the sound effects for that I seemed to recall we recorded a friend of Steve Ritchie's dirt bike for that game for some of them dirt bike stuff and Greg Freres to a lot of the voice for it too who did the skull talking that was Steve oh really it was Steve huh okay and then I processed it what to add some edge to it yeah yeah I think I pitched it down at it's some reverb and some probably some some coursing or something like that now when you're doing this this sound processing are you doing this in the in the in the William studio or ready your desk at that time I was working from home I was a contractor so I had a home studio you know with I forget what I was using at that point probably pro tools also probably sound maybe sound forward at that point I'm not sure and we were also in the early days of DCS we actually had a proprietary piece of software that we would record we I guess maybe we would process our files into it that it would because then it would spit it out of the very specific sample rate that we needed but then I think eventually we're able to just use sound for it to do that for attack from Mars um wait now who was doing the the the voices for for attack from Mars that was mostly people around the company Tim Kittsrow who did a lot of voice work for us over the years we hired him he was a couple I think probably a couple characters he was definitely the general um and he could do he could do a lot he could do a lot of different things with his voice so he probably played a number of characters but we had Vince I believe played the French guy um god I get that one confused with revenge from Mars um I believe Sal Davida did the Italian voice you know who he is no he's longtime video game guy