FUTURE LIBRARY PODCAST #10: Ross Nicoll (Audio Design Lead at Ruffian Games) worked on teams winning two BAFTAS for video game audio. In his spare time he plays in Revolver, a fun Beatles tribute band. Alex catches up with him on everything from Dundee music shops to Hollywood sound capture methods.
The latest episode from the Future Library podcast series manages to be both parochial and global in its appeal. I mean who wouldn’t want to hear about the state of Dundee’s music shops? Or how an insane number of teams worked on the widely recognised Xbox videogame Kinect Star Wars?
It’s the podcast that reminds you how interesting a place Dundee in Scotland actually is. If only the local media weren’t so mediocre in their efforts to promote culture and the arts, perhaps people’s perceptions would be different. I won’t transcribe the chat but here’s a few things that come up early on.
- Ross qualified as a sound engineer after completing school.
- By working in a local music shop he made a contact at VIS, who made games including Earthworm Jim 3D, and State of Emergency, before ending in 2005.
VIS is best known for its controversial and commercially successful title State of Emergency, which was published by Rockstar Games in the wake of the huge success of Grand Theft Auto.
- They chat about Dundee musicians working in the video game industry, how it plays an important role in the overall UK video games industry.
- Laeto’s Fraser Simpson is now lead designer at Echo Peak having moved from Dundee to Brighton, whose recent game was all about Snoop Dogg, called Way of the Dogg.
- Kevin Black of Laeto/Fat Goth is working for Outplay Entertainment.
- Ross references DMA in Dundee which was the origin of Rockstar North and the Grand Theft Auto series.
- DMA/Rockstar North info from wikipedia
Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design Ltd) is a British video game developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, best known for creating the Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings franchises in its earlier guise as DMA.
- Video games industry related courses at Dundee’s Abertay University, the start-up culture around it.
- Grand Theft Auto Vice City, the in-game posters for things in Dundee including the Discovery.
- Ross talks about getting his first break at VIS, a junior role “learning from the ground up“,
- They skip over his Xbox 360 game Crackdown which won a BAFTA for audio at this point and Alex asks about the photo of Ross, “in the desert with machine guns..!?”
- Ross chats about being at Ruffian Games, working on Crackdown 2 (the sequel to Crackdown which he worked on at Realtime Worlds).
- “We had to record machine guns. I got flown over to Hollywood, staying at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, working with these guys from a company called Soundelux (Skyfall, Iron Man 3). They do the big Hollywood movies. So it was me and these guys and a bunch of guys from Microsoft, all drove out to the Mojave Desert, stopped at a shop called Guns 4 You, loaded up a truck full of guns, and then shot and recorded them. It was fucking great!”
FOR MORE, LISTEN TO THE PODCAST EMBEDDED ON THIS PAGE (TOP RIGHT CORNER).
FACEBOOK PAGE FOR ROSS’ BAND REVOLVER (BEATLES TRIBUTE)
