Eight boys are huddled around an arcade video game-whooping and hollering and stamping their feet-while electronic characters on its screen karate kick each other in the face. Ominous music and prerecorded war cries churn and explode with the action, cranking up the tension and excitement.
It’s a common scene in arcades across the country and around the world-except that these particular “boys” range in age from 24 to 39, and they’re getting paid to play. When they’re not testing products, they write music and create sound effects for games manufactured by Williams Electronic Games Inc., Chicago’s pinball and arcade-video giant.
“It seems like a dumb way for a grown man to make a living,” says Paul Heitsch, 36, one of four composers-or, as they call themselves, sound designers-on the company’s staff. “But every once in a while I have to remind myself how lucky I am.”
On the screen of the game, Mortal Kombat II, a video warrior takes a flying leap and kicks a burst of gore from an opponent’s head. The music responds with a screeching crescendo. The guys throw up their arms and scream with glee.
Located on North California Avenue, Williams is the world’s largest manufacturer of pinball and coin-operated video games, under the names Williams, Bally and Midway. The company claims 75 percent of the world pinball market, and 60 percent of the world arcade video-game market. The coin-operated game industry as a whole takes in more than $8 billion a year.
High-tech toys
In an obscure corner of the company’s factory, down a hallway cluttered with spare video-game parts, past a machine shop, is a nondescript door that leads into the sound department. Inside, a corridor is lined with offices, each jammed with the latest in synthesizers and computer-music equipment. At the end of the hall is a recording studio. The composers, along with their manager and their engineer, like to talk in “Star Wars” terms-they call the sound department the “rebel base.” Figurines from the movie line a shelf in the office of manager Matt Booty, 27 (his nickname: Luke Skywalker).
But the atmosphere is more like a treehouse, a secret hideout stacked with high-tech toys. The club is made more elite by the credentials of its members: Among the seven sound designers (four full-time, three free-lance), there are five music degrees-two B.A.s, two M.A.s and a Ph.D.
It’s easy to imagine such learned composers raising their noses at low-brow culture, but these fellows seem uniquely suited for their jobs. “I played a lot of pinball and video games in college,” says Chris Granner, 36, a free-lancer in the group who holds a master’s degree in composition from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Games are great, and they’ve become much greater as a result of not having to pay for them.”
“I’ve always had an interest in mindless amusement,” says Dan Forden, 30, a free-lancer who holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Oberlin College.
Sound for pinball and video games has taken a huge leap since the beeps, bongs and whistles of the past. Today the machines run computer software and feature the same digitally processed quality found on compact discs. “Sound is like night and day compared to 10 years ago,” Granner says.
Williams Electronic recently developed a sound technology for its games called the digital compression system. Multiple tracks can be compressed into four sound channels. Typically one channel is used for music, the other three for sound effects and speech.
“The big difference between arcade games and TV or movies is that the games have interactive soundtracks,” Granner says. As the silver ball shoots across a game’s playing field, ricochetting off various bumpers and surfaces, it triggers different loops of sound effects and music. Compositions are typically about 45 seconds long but repeat and overlap with other musical pieces.
Elaborate orchestral scores boom from some of the games, while raucous heavy metal jams from others. Dave Zabriskie, 39, is the group’s resident orchestral expert.
“My forte with this company is that I know classical music backwards and forwards, with orchestral instruments, while most of the other guys are rockers,” says Zabriskie, who has a doctoral degree in music composition from Northwestern University. “But everybody really likes what they’re doing here-being innovative and creative, trying new things, going nuts.”
Zabriskie is working on a series of original compositions and sound effects for the company’s next big release, the Flintstones pinball game. It’ll be one of the company’s first games to feature a heavy orchestral score, he says.
Zabriskie’s office is typical in that he has a personal computer on his desk next to a stack of black boxes-the signal processors and other gizmos that allow him to create any imaginable sound with the keyboard behind him. With the computer he’s able to build scores, one instrumental part at a time. But not all the music he and his colleagues create is computer generated; composer Vince Pontarelli sometimes lays down live guitar riffs.
Just as a film scorer watches movie clips while composing the accompanying music, Zabriskie and his cohorts use monitors to view graphics of the game they’re scoring. For the Flintstones game-the release of which will coincide with the opening of the new “Flintstones” movie Memorial Day weekend-he’s working on music that will complement several visual themes, including “Dino,” “Bedrock Derby” and “Bowl-a-Rama.”
From Dracula to Mortal Kombat
Games often tie in with movies and TV shows. Recent Williams pinball games have included Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventure; Star Trek: The Next Generation; the Addams Family; and Dracula. In such cases, snippets of familiar movie music-such as the theme from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-are licensed from the film studios. The composers at Williams then incorporate those passages into longer, original compositions that are better suited to the fast pace of pinball.
“There has to be a quick tempo, so that limits the effectiveness of a lot of film music,” Granner says.
When writing music and sound effects for movie games, the composers at Williams sometimes work with the films’ stars. Heitsch flew to London to coordinate Gary Oldman’s vocal dubs for the Dracula game, and Forden traveled to Los Angeles to record speech bytes with the cast of TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
A few of the games, particularly Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II, have sparked controversy because of their violent content. “I think it’s disturbing that the more violent the game is, the more it sells,” says Forden, who wrote the music for both Mortal Kombat games. “But Mortal Kombat takes place in a fantasy world, and is not representative of any reality that anyone knows about. I think people understand the difference.”
While there might be some competition among the composers for the more attractive assignments, they seem to keep politics to a minimum. The field stays level with the help of a tradition they’ve developed: They make fun of each other constantly. “We all know each other’s good and bad sides,” says composer Jon Hey, 38. “We can be caustic-what we call `the pitchfork’-but there’s no back-stabbing, just good natured front-stabbing.”
Not all fun and games
The composers say they usually have six to nine months to work on the score for a particular game, periodically reporting to the people who designed it. But they say they work on two or three projects simultaneously.
The job does have at least one drawback: Because the average player doesn’t come close to beating a game, he hears only about 10 or 20 percent of the music and sound composed for it.
And to anyone who may secretly covet their world of sustained adolescence, Heitsch offers these consolatory words: “As fun as it is, as many toys as we have to play with, it’s still a job.”
