I took a little trip today to visit my friend, Rich who works at Electronic Arts for a game team that developed the upcoming James Bond title. The game is done and is getting ready for X-mas release, so he’s got a bit of downtime to recover from the months of work.

Rich gave me the quick tour of the EA campus and the audio facilities. They have a couple of nice rooms for editing and recording, but for the most part, the audio guys have workstations (more like coat rooms) where they edit and program cues. He showed me the game and the tools used to develop the sound cues and loops, along with the really cool surround pan/virtual microphone system as well as a game world sound placement application. It’s really quite amazing how the game takes bits of the orchestral soundtrack material that loop until different events occurred in the game. After seeing the editing application, i’ve found a new respect for the people who slave for hours over this tedious task.

I saw some interesting things including the Microsoft Xbox Devkits which are really G5 Towers as well as the debug units which display processed events as the game progresses. The game definitely looks great, and it’s cool to hear the voiceovers from Sean Connery!

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