Sam and Max Done Slow…

I’ve been working on a lot of new projects lately; some Product Management stuff with Dennis’ iPad development team, writing for a handful of sites and magazines that I hadn’t worked with before and even doing some game type stuff on top of all that in what little spare time I have. It’s been really interesting to learn to look at things in a new way; some of the reasoning that goes into User Interface and audio design in games is really fascinating when you get down into the nitty-gritty.

One thing in particular that seems to stand out is how UI design and documentation (including tutorials) for modern games differ from old ones. I can’t remember anything but the most token of tutorials or explanations in games like Doom or Day of the Tentacle, yet these days games like Modern Warfare and Fable are overflowing with tooltips and guided examples. It’s easy to shrug a lot of this off by saying that new games have much more complicated features – Doom didn’t have a crouch button, let alone grenades – but that’s a poor excuse and ignores the fact that MW can rely on common user assumptions more than Doom could have.

Monkey Island never had to explain ‘This is how you talk to people’, so why does Fable lecture me about being nice or nasty to people? It’s not because this is a deeper feature which requires explanation (we all know it pays to not be an asshole, right?), but because there’s a greater gap between what you do, how you do it and the level it’s been gamified to. What was important and simple in Monkey Island is important, more complex and worth points in Fable.

Spurred on by the latest issue of Kill Screen, I’ve also been reading a lot about audio design in games too lately – especially the composition and value of ambient music. I even took the theme tune from Lucasarts’ Sam and Max Hit the Road and slowed it down 6.4x just to get an idea of how the same melody can create and entirely different mood, which is what you can listen to above.

Creepy different, eh? Sadly, it’s one of the few games of that era that comes out well when slowed down, as there tends to be a lot of snare drum on the other Lucasart soundtracks – slow that down and it just sounds like white noise. The same holds true for the original Doom soundtrack. Grim Fandango, on the other hand, sounds great.

Listen to the original song here.

Joe, Out.