![]() You likely won’t notice this much when playing, but it really helped us isolate and refine how each section of a room felt without resorting to having to track a player’s position and turn banks of sounds on and off. We always occluded sounds from adjacent rooms, but now we have the power to place occlusion objects inside of rooms to separate interior areas from each other. Metroid Prime 3 is also the first Prime to have simple occlusion available inside of single rooms. Every Space Pirate blaster shot (and most every other enemy projectile) has a loop sound attached to it, and you can really hear shots whizzing by your ear as they pass you by. My favorite application of this is that we now have true Doppler shifting in all of our moving sounds. This additional horsepower of the system allowed us to use filters and pitch shifting more extensively. Overall, the Wii’s audio capability is an evolution of what we had on the GameCube, but with additional horsepower. The increased RAM size allowed us to use higher resolution audio samples throughout Metroid Prime 3 which made a significant positive impact on the overall quality and aesthetic of the audio experience. Petersen: The two most important changes in developing audio for the Wii for us were that it gave us the opportunity to create a new set of audio development tools from scratch, and that we were able to significantly expand our audio RAM budget. Yamamoto-san, did your work on Excite Truck prepare you for the task of composing on the Wii? Jayson: Given that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption is the first title in the series developed for the Wii, describe the technological advances that have occurred in the audio department and how they have been implemented to improve the Metroid experience. From that stand point, I feel it is fair to say that the music for Metroid has transformed drastically. With the side-scrolling Metroid in mind, I believed I could make it sound more realistic and well suited for FPS game. The original Metroid theme arrangement blended well with the newly composed Metroid Prime music to create the distinct Metroid Prime universe. On top of that, since I wanted to give a strong impression of the Metroid universe to players experiencing this realistic first-person game environment, the important original theme of Metroid had to be arranged as well. Yamamoto: When we made the shift from side-scrolling Metroid to a first-person adventure Metroid, we needed to have more realistic sound effects and environmental sounds. It was a bold idea to create a 3D Metroid from the start, so the audio had to support that. Scott Petersen (Retro Studios): Since the sound transition was from on-chip sound synthesis for everything 2D Metroid to full resolution, sample based sound effects and streaming audio for our 3D Metroid Prime, I would say that it would be fair to describe the audio transformation as drastic. While many familiar musical themes have been carried over from the original Metroid titles, does the audio team feel as though the Metroid sound went through as drastic a transformation? Jayson: Retro Studios successfully redefined the Metroid universe with the release of Metroid Prime on the GameCube, which took the series from its side-scroller roots into the first-person shooter realm. Re-reading this, I’m curious to hear how Yamamoto’s collaboration with Retro Studios is going for Donkey Kong Country Returns!Ĭheck out the interview after the jump and let us know your thoughts. This is the interview that I’m probably the most proud of, and I want to thank Nintendo once again for coordinating it and allowing us to republish it along with both Kenji Yamamoto and Scott Petersen for providing such thorough responses. In the interview we discuss the series’s transition from 2D into the 3D realm, the audio technology behind the Wii and the Prime series in particular, the interactions between the Japan-based Kenji Yamamoto and the Texas-based Retro Studios, and Nintendo’s lack of official soundtrack releases. This time I thought it would be fun to celebrate the upcoming release of Metroid: Other M next week by posting the interview I conducted with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption composer Kenji Yamamoto and Retro Studios sound supervisor Scott Petersen. We’re republishing them here on a somewhat monthly basis as they’re not longer available online. For those who don’t remember, “ A Blast From The Past” is an interview series that revisits interviews I conducted while at Music4Games. I’ve been intentionally holding on to this one for awhile now.
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