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I have built three audio studio/departments during my decade-long stint in interactive/game sound. The latest is a temporary setup for Los Angeles-based Obsidian Entertainment, of which I am the new audio director. Obsidian is not a multimillion recording/mixing facility on the scale of the new Sony game complex in San Diego or Electronic Arts' studios in Vancouver. We're a smaller, workhorse company focusing on integrating audio from outside providers. But in the world of games, companies like Obsidian do a lot of the work, and $25,000 is enough to equip a productive room if we choose our resources wisely.
Obsidian is run by Feargus Urquhart, who, along with the other four company owners (Chris Jones, Darren Monahan, Chris Avellone and Chris Parker), has been developing top role-playing games such as Fallout and Knights of the Old Republic II. (Fallout was one of the first games to use Hollywood voice-over talent - Ron Perlman, David Warner and Tony Shalhoub.) Now, Obsidian is branching into more settings with developing a role-playing game based on the Alien film franchise and an upcoming expansion pack in the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms universe: Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer.
Life as a developer, as compared to a publisher, has come a long way. When I started in this business more than 10 years ago, you were lucky if you could afford a top-of-the-line sound card (which at the time would have not been an Audiomedia III but a Sound Blaster AWE64). Publishers began building uber-studios when record industry and film industry talent started talking with top game publishers; I can remember back to 1995 when Spencer Nielsen built Sega's high-dollar in-house studio in San Francisco. At that time, developers had it rough. Budgets for games - in total - rarely hit $1 million and audio budgets would be, at most, $50k. Oddly enough, this is roughly the same as the 2 to 3 percent (up to 5 percent) that audio budgets in film allow (my sources being The Village's budget on The Smoking Gun and Oscar-winning sound designer Randy Thom's estimate on FilmSound.org).
These days, your...