Gouveia - Getting started with C++ audio programming for game development a hands-on guide to audio programming in game development with the FMOD audio library and toolkit

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Audio is certainly one of the most powerful tools at our disposal when it comes to making the players feel something from a video game. Audio can serve many different purposes in video games, such as giving feedback with sound effects, increasing immersion with ambient tracks, telling stories with recorded speech, or conveying all kinds of emotions through background music.

Video games have been making use of sound since their earliest days. For instance, the 1972 classic, Pong, used a beep sound effect to provide feedback whenever the ball collided with something, with different pitches used to distinguish between collisions with the walls, collisions with the paddles, or the ball leaving the game court.

Space Invaders, on the other hand, made a very clever use of its rudimentary background music by progressively increasing the speed of the song as the danger of the alien invasion drew closer, thus enhancing the feelings of tension within the player. Studies have shown that gamers that played the game without sound did not feel the same sense of urgency, and their heart rates did not rise like the ones that played the game with the sound turned on.

Since those days, there have been many advances in technology, which allowed audio in games to evolve considerably. Most games began using recorded audio instead of crude synthesized tones, and new techniques such as 3D audio now allow the players to feel like the sound is coming from all around them and interacting with the game environment.

Music has also played a very important role in video games. The popular Final Fantasy games owe a great portion of their emotional impact to the sweeping, cinematic soundtracks composed by Nobuo Uematsu. The most memorable scenes in the series would have not been the same without the music that accompanied them.

Many developers and composers have also looked into ways of making the music react to the game play. For example, starting with Monkey Island 2, LeChuck's Revenge , every graphic adventure game that LucasArts created uses a custom interactive music system called iMUSE, which among other features, allows seamless musical transitions between themes as the player moves from one room to another.