It was close to standing-room-only at Radical’s Rob Bridgett’s session on sound design and mixing for the Scarface game. The unique thing about the process here was, the team collaborated with Randy Thom and the audio group up at Skywalker to employ a traditional movie post production model. Placeholders were ultimately swapped out with high-quality sounds produced offline in a schedule that paralleled a typical film project: The plan was, a week of offline sound design, another week with Thom, and two months for integration-and they stuck to their timetable as best they could.

In a video interview, Thom explained the creative goal for Scarface sound design as simple: exaggerated reality, no sci-fi effects, just a heightened version of Tony Montana’s “real” world. As someone at the crossroads of film and game sound, Thom is confident that the gap is closing: “The biggest limitation in sound for games is technology: The sampling rates are half of what we’re used to, and that just means the sound quality is lower. Fortunately, technology is headed in that direction; in next-generation games I think the sound will be very similar to what you see in a movie.” We agree, and we can’t wait…

Check out our recent feature on sound for Scarface.