Clint Bajakian response to Pawel's Audio queries

Hi Pawel,

That sounds like a really cool project. And thanks for getting in touch.

You are correct in saying that I dont remember too much because it really was so long ago - my goodness I believe 30 years! But I do recall that the libraries you have identified are exactly correct, those are the main ones that we had at that time. That was relatively early, if not very early, in the ability to even have digital sound in a computer game, at least at LucasArts. So it is understandable that we had very few, but key, libraries.

You are also correct, that I did a lot of mixing and blending to create some effects, and, of course, things like phase, or pitch shifting to fundamentally change the quality of a sound.

But the other tremendous advantage we had is access to some of the original film sound effects by Ben Burtt. I can promise that if a TIE fighter went over head, I wasn’t designing the sound myself ha ha! We didnt have all too many sound effects from the films, but we had key sound effects from them, the iconic things that you can imagine. Light sabers, TIE fighters, other vehicles, R2 D2 sounds, etc..

Having said that, I can also say that being so early in the development of games with digital sound, there werent that many sound effects. As you probably know, a current game like call of duty probably has upwards of 10,000 audio files on disk. I think we had fewer than 150 for the whole game. Times were different!

Thats really all I recall, sorry I cant be of more help. But the knowledge that we did have access to some of the film sounds is probably the main missing piece that you’ve experienced.

All the best in your continued work!

Clint