One of the first things gamers noticed when playing Crash Mode in Burnout Revenge was that now there was a crowd cheering you on. We spoke to Lewis, one of our Audio Designers, to give us the details.
I was surprised to hear that, in Burnout Revenge, you can actually HEAR the development team in the game! How did that come about?
Lewis: During the making of Burnout Revenge we thought it might heighten the excitement of Crash mode if we put in a crowd of imaginary spectators cheering the action. At first we tried crowd noise from other sports, like football, Ice Hockey, and American football. Unfortunately these generic recordings made it sound just like a wash of noisy people randomly cheering events that didn't really connect with what you were seeing on screen. But instead of abandoning the effort, we thought, "right, well if that doesn't work, let's put in our OWN crowd."
In typical Criterion fashion, that's an idea out of left field! How did the rest of the team feel about it?
Lewis: I think initially it was greeted with mixed feelings once the team realised that what we meant by "our OWN" crowd—was them. Nevertheless we got everyone into a tiny little room on the first floor, all crammed in and ready to scream their heads off. I remember our creative director Alex saying to me about 2 minutes before we started, "You'll never get the programmers to shout for this—it's hard enough to get them to shout at all."
Lewis preps the choir
But by then it was too late. I got to the room and there were about 30 or 40 people there, ready to go—looking surprisingly enthusiastic and doing vocal exercises. One of our graphics programmers, Keith, was actually doing stretches. Suddenly I had a glimmer of hope—all I had to do now was ply them with free pizza and this might actually work...
Pizza generally does the trick, what happened next?
Lewis: So we turned on the mics and did a test. It nearly blew my head off. I was standing at the front, trying to conduct this group that had suddenly gone crazy out of nowhere, and I remember thinking, "This must be a really tough project..." because the instant they were given the chance to relieve stress, the room was filled with riotous, salivating, screaming hooligans.
We went through the list of sounds we needed to record, each one getting louder and louder with more and more chanting and screaming, until I noticed that one of our artists looked as though he was about to cough up his voice box, his face red from screaming at the top of his lungs. Then we took a break.
How long did it take to get right?
Lewis: After the aforementioned free pizza we did a few sessions of this shouting—until we had enough depth and variety to make the game—but the team's general consensus was that we should probably repeat on a weekly basis, if only for its therapeutic properties!
I notice a subtle different on Revenge 360's Crowds...why is this?
Lewis: We thought it would be cool to get some US flavour to our crowds for the next-gen version of the game. So we hooked up with our publishing partners in California, gave them a brief and off they went to a part of the EA Redwood Shores campus with a load of buddies and repeated the exercise that we did with the team! It gave a different take to the audio and in the process we were able to get seemingly everyone shouting about this game!
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