During GDC this year and the week after I ended up telling the story of how I got into the industry a few times, so I decided to commit it to the ether for posterity or some false sense of self-worth. I’ve also decided to embarrass myself publicly by digitizing the demo I made way back then in 1998 that got me into game audio. It is horrible and borders on unlistenable. Well technically you can listen to it, but you wouldn’t want to, and it’s hard to fathom how someone could have heard this monstrosity and then offered me a job.
My story, while it may not have been exactly common 15+ years ago, doesn’t really happen anymore. The short story is that I lied my way into game audio. The longer story is that I was temping at Berkeley Systems, a video game company in Berkeley, CA after graduating college and they liked me enough to keep me on as their shipping guy. I liked it there, but really wanted to be doing something creative, so I started making a lot of noise as such. I was passed up for a production assistant job (thankfully) and ended up talking to their sound designer a couple times because I thought he had such a cool, crazy job. At this point in my life I’d never used a computer program related to sound ever. I knew how to play notes in BASIC and had a cassette 4-track and had done tons of music, tape loops, and other weird experimental stuff ever since I was a kid, but I didn’t know what MIDI was, how to create a sound effect or really much of anything in regards to sound and computers.
Anyway, one day the VP of Product Development called me into his office to tell me they fired their sound designer (apparently he didn’t come into work very often and they’d had to contract out all their sound work as a result). So he wondered what experience I had and if I’d be interested in the job. I couldn’t believe this was happening, so seeing an amazing opportunity, I lied through my teeth, telling him I had tons of experience and had scored some student films, blah blah blah. He asked me to bring in a demo the next day. I ran home that night and banged a couple things out on my sampler (half of which were a couple synthy pad soundscapes I claimed were from a student film I worked on. They weren’t.) and threw another horrible track called “Gall Stone Attack” onto a cassette and gave it to him. The next week he called me into his office and said “It’s nothing you’re ever gonna hear in any of our games, but it shows you know what you’re doing, so you got the job.” I was ecstatic. And because they’d already farmed out their sound work for the next 6 months or more, I locked myself in my office and started teaching myself everything I could about digital audio and sound design. I believe my first experiment in editing digital audio was removing all the guitar solos from Slayer’s Seasons in the Abyss, but that’s a story for another day. Nowadays, kids are coming out of school with degrees in sound design and blowing me away with their skillsets, so this whole thing known as my career could never happen today.
Everything on my demo was recorded with a Roland S-50 12-bit (!) sampler. It had a floppy drive and I had tons of sample disks for everything from pads to horns and strings to sfx. “Gall Stone Attack” also had a Roland R-8mkII drum machine and Casio SK-5 on it (and I think I used the SK-5 on “Silly Torture” as well). Since I had no sequencer or even an audio editor or audio interface for my computer, each track was recorded live onto my Fostex 4-track and mixed down to the cassette below. (I opted to not de-noise these as part of the digitization process, so they could “preserved” in the state in which they were originally heard).
And so without further ado, I present a public shaming: two tracks from my demo reel in early 1998. I cringe when I listen, and laugh a little. My skills have definitely come a long way, but I still can’t believe they listened to this crap and took a gamble on me anyway. I’m eternally grateful and shocked. Be forewarned. Be gentle.
[soundcloud params="show_comments=false" ]http://soundcloud.com/revdrbradleydmeyer/02_SillyTorture-mp3[/soundcloud]
[soundcloud params="show_comments=false" ]http://soundcloud.com/revdrbradleydmeyer/03_GallStoneAttack-mp3[/soundcloud]
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