They had just come from another audio session over in the US where they took recordings of many cars that will appear in the game when it’s released next month.
These guys knew precisely what they needed, how to get it, and from which place on the car’s body. The set-up and positioning of the various microphones was the hardest and most time-consuming part of the whole exercise.
The team showed up with suitcases full of equipment, studio and on-field high-end microphones of all types, and digital recorders to capture the multitude of audio tracks they would be recording for each car. It’s a tough job, but someone had to do it! Yes, that’s right, I actually got to drive the hell out of most of the cars you will see in this post at a deserted Ebisu North and East course – tracks we had rented for the week. Studie AG was good enough to send up its brand new i8, the boss’s car, knowing full well that it would be properly used and abused by yours truly. More specifically, the noises they make rolling at slow speed all the way through to squealing for dear life when you push them beyond their grip capabilities. This, as the three audio engineers who flew over from Sweden told me, would be the cleanest and most accurate way to capture the true sound of the tyres. So why was it one of the five cars that I organized to come up to Ebisu Circuit? Simple, it’s electric – or at least partially – but it has an electric mode where you can drive it just on the juice stored in its battery pack. Now, before I go any further, no, the BMW i8 will not be in the new NFS game. And boy was I about to get a very graphic demonstration of just how much importance the guys at NFS put on this aspect. Think about it, isn’t the engine sound that you hear in a car game one of the first things you notice and comment on, and perhaps even criticise for a lack of realism? I know this is one angle of games that I’ve always been pretty strict about, after all, if you are a car otaku, sound is definitely something that you take pretty seriously.
The operative word for this project was sound. But it was a week back in April that will forever be cemented in my mind an experience that further reinforced the sheer amount of detail that the NFS team go down to in order to deliver the best product they can. There’s so much that the programmers, engineers, artists and developers have to do that it boggles my mind how it all comes together so beautifully in the end. The more I helped, the more I realised the monumental job that putting a game like this together must be not only having to live up to one of the most successful franchises out there, but also to push the boundaries in many different ways. On top of various reference shoots to help the crew at Ghost accurately recreate the cars, aero kits and wheels we all love, I was also called on to relate what Japanese car culture is all about and show its various facets so that it could come across at the core of the game. Over the last year, I have played a small part in the development of the much anticipated new release of Need for Speed.