Dark Sector – Veggie Abuse

Slaughtering Vegetables for the Greater Good

During the development of Dark Sector it was decided that we had wanted to record our own sound library of squishy/horror/gross sounds since a vast majority of the game play involves dismembering multiple forms of enemy A.I. We figured it’d be well worth the time investment since in the end we’d have a unique collection of sounds nobody had ever used before. Now, I’m not knocking the stock sound effects libraries, but I mean…we’ve heard them a million times already. Part of my philosophy as a sound designer is to record new and fresh material all the time, unless it’s something more difficult to obtain (like gun sounds for instance…there aren’t any shooting ranges nearby that offer military weaponry).

Having watched multiple ‘behind-the-scenes’ featurettes on DVDs and YouTube I felt that the sound community could benefit if we had captured video footage of our foray into vegetable massacre. The end result of this idea can be viewed below.

Once the video was complete, it was then decided that this little piece of ‘how it was made’ video could be used to not only give the public an idea of what goes into game sound design, but also as a marketing tool to promote the game.

We thought it’d be a cool idea but didn’t think much of it, since we weren’t sure how many people would take the time to download or watch the clip. It turns out a whole lot of people wanted to see it. After its first month of release on GameTrailers the clip had been viewed in excess of 200,000 times…more than any game play trailer we had released up to that point. It was amazing to see so many people taking an interest in what we do as sound designers.