Beep: A Documentary History Of Game Sound

Fascinating look behind the scenes of game audio

Loved this. Historic nostalgia at its best. Fascinating documentary covering the dawn of sound effects in gaming.

As a computer geek and nerd who has lived through the seventies, eighties and nineties, I witnesses everything first hand and thus was thrilled by the idea of this documentary. I guess my expectations were too high though. The first 45 minutes are about the history of the sounds and the biggest part of the documentary completely focusses on modern day games and even the sound of facebook games. After 70 minutes I switched off because I have no interest in facebook sounds. This is clearly a poor attempt at making a documentary on such a topic. It just races through the 1980's and leaves a lot of milestones and important events out.Here are some topics that are important to us geeks but completely missing from this documentary:- the first digitized voice in a computer game (like Mission Impossible from 1984)- the sounds of the first handheld devices and tabletops (like the Nintendo Game & Watch LCD games or even earlier tabletop electronic games)- a better or deeper focus on the first portable game consoles or game consoles at all- first computer sounds on CD (like the Chris Huelsbeck CD's in the 1980's)- first game soundtrack on CD (early to mid 1990's)- Game scores by bands like White Zombie for Way of the Warrior and Nine Inch Nails for Quake- the first surround sound tracks in computer gamesand the list goes on and on with important stuff that is missing. To summon it up, this documentary briefly scratches the more important decades of Game Sound and looses itself too soon in present day gaming sounds.