October 2021
Don Veca has been working as Audio Director, and now Audio Principal at Sledgehammer Games/Activision since 2010, and at Electronic Arts for 18 years before that. He is credited on 39 games.
Don started working in game audio because he had a background in both music and computer science. After starting out as an audio tools programmer at EA, he cross-faded into music and sound design.
His first game as Composer/Sound Designer was Road Rash III (Sega Genesis), and his most recent games were Dead Space (winning 20 audio awards including DICE, BAFTA, GANG, and GDC), Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (nominated for DICE, BAFTA, and winning GANG's Best Sound Design and Audio of the Year awards), and COD: WWII.
But all this is really just a hobby... he’s actually a Funk/Jazz bass player – just in case the game audio thing doesn't work out…
MASA: We’d love to hear about your career-path so far and how you found your way into the industry.
DON: I started out as a musician, received a BA in Music from SJSU, and was playing “six-nighters” around the SF Bay. Then in the mid 80s, I heard about this new “MIDI thing” that sounded really cool, so I decided to go back and re-take my college Electro-Acoustic music course that I totally blew off as “uncool” the first time through. They had this big original and very intimidating Buchla synthesizer, some basic two-track recording gear, and an early model DOS-based PC that ran a programming language called Forth, which had a simple software library that allowed us to write code to send MIDI messages to the synths. I started experimenting with generative music algorithms, and soon found that I was absolutely hooked. While I knew quite a bit about music, I realized that I needed to know a lot more about computer programming to do anything that actually sounded musical. So… I decided to quit the six-night gig scene and get a BS in computer science (literally starting from Algebra 1a!).
As I was finishing my last semester of computer science, I was able to fake my way into the Apple Computer QA department (I knew nothing at all about Apple computers; my wife had to teach me how to use the Finder!). Apple had just released “System 6.0” with an extremely buggy Audio Manager system library; so, I snuck my way into writing test tools, the Audio Manger, then MIDI Manager, and then became the QA lead for QuickTime 1.0. This was a great technical learning experience, but I wasn’t able to do any sound or music content; so when one of the Apple audio engineers who had moved to Electronic Arts called me about an opportunity writing audio development tools for the “then new and top-secret 3DO gaming platform,” I got an interview with the now legendary Rob Hubbard. Rob walked into the interview room, gave me a (unsharpened) pencil and a sheet of manuscript paper, and said “Write a theme for a Madden Football game; I’ll be back in 15 minutes. I guess it was wasn’t too awful, because I somehow got the gig.
From there, I started helping Rob with a few tunes for Road Rash II, and then took on all the sound design and music as Audio Lead for games such as Road Rash III (my favorite of all projects), and the “Strike Series.” Soon, I found myself working as a full-time music composer on projects such as John Madden Football, Tiger Woods Golf, USAF, NASCAR Rumble, Knock out Kings, the James Bond series, and also wrote a symphonic score for WWII fighters, which won the very first notable game music award (from PC Gaming Magazine).
Eventually, however, the music composition scene started to dry up due to a short-lived trend of using up-and-coming rock/pop bands instead of video game music composers. Seeing the “writing on the wall,” I got the gig as Audio Director for the Lord of the Ring series that EA had just embarked on, flew to New Zealand and recorded all the folks from Middle Earth, and shipped The Two Towers, The Return of the King, (which won several game audio awards), and The Third Age.
From there I moved to the new Dead Space team, which to my total surprise won literally 20 audio awards including DICE, BAFTA, GANG, and GDC. I eventually followed most of the Dead Space team to Activision to work on the Call of Duty series.
MASA: It would be great to hear a bit about your field recording work.
DON: Field recordings were few and far between back in the early Bay Area video game studio days; it was hard enough to justify purchasing decent sound effects libraries. When we moved from Foster City to EA Redwood Shores, we built a brand-new pro-quality recording studio where we could record VO. The very first Dead Space session was in that booth. It was a “blood & guts horror” session where we demolished about 50 bucks worth of fruits and vegetables (and permanently stained the pristine booth walls in a psychedelic montage). Another notable and quite fun session was the “Dead Space stair-well bumps in the night” session, where we dropped anything we could find down several flights of our extremely reverberant studio stair-well (including some quite expensive Herman Miller furniture). And then there was the infamous “Bart Train” session, where Dave Feise and I hid our Sound Devices (and bota bags) in our back packs and got on at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train segment that runs under the SF Bay (we were standing in the segment between the cars next to the sign that read “Do Not Stand Between Cars!”).
The first major AAA recording I was involved in was after moving to the Sledgehammer Games (SHG) studio at Activision to co-dev Modern Warfare III with Infinity Ward. The first session I remember was out at a shooting range in the hot-as-hell Arizona desert. The Infinity Ward audio team had hired their go-to professional movie recordist to virtually run the entire session using some highly experienced military dudes with some absolutely amazing modern weapons. I don’t remember the details, but the mic set-up was incredible. We got some pretty great source material, but we only had a few opportunities like that. The huge take-away for me at the time was a) This was crazy expensive, and b) Being the first time I’d had the opportunity to actually shoot an automatic weapon, I realized that the guns sound significantly different when you hear other people shooting them (which is what the mic is picking up) compared to what they sound – and feel – like when you are actually holding them and shoot them yourself, i.e., using stand-alone source recordings for “player weapons” just doesn’t cut it; we went on to spend a huge development time enhancing the raw recordings with multiple and varied samples.
Fast-forward to SHG’s next title, COD: Advanced Warfare, where we were now on a full three-year dev cycle. I had just moved to Foster City where SHG is located where the city sponsors an amazing fireworks display over the Foster City Lagoon every 4th of July. While most of the SHG team was enjoying the show from the SHG balcony, however, the two lead sounds designers, Dave Swenson and Travis Naas “snuck into” (they asked first) the fireworks launching area with a modest gaggle of mics. Aside from a bit of crowd ambience now and then, the recordings blew everyone away. This single event completely changed the way we approached field recordings from then on, and the audio team went on to track down tank and weapons hobbyists, airshows, etc. where, with just mentioning that you work on Call of Duty (and a little SWAG), the team was able to get AAA source recordings, and could do a lot more of them (with our own incredible mic setup).
MASA: Tell us about the language you created for the zombies in Call of Duty: WWII!
DON: Ha! That was a lot of fun; it was during the development of SHG’s third title, “Call of Duty: WWII.” This was also the first time we were responsible for the Zombies mode, “Nazi Zombies.” For this project, the studio’s General Manager and studio co-founder, Glen Schofield, wanted the main zombie class to look and feel more “humanoid” than the other more “monstrous” breeds. So, the idea was that we’d do much less processing on their vocalizations, but that wasn’t really enough. This just happened to be around the time that Game of Thrones was very popular, and being quite interested in linguistics, I was always amazed at the new and very believable languages they were able to create for the show. So after watching a documentary on the “making of the languages,” I was inspired to come up with my own new language, which I named Zomdeutsch.
I wanted a language that was uniquely unrecognizable, yet still “sounded German.” I also wanted to be able to create a tool that would translate real written dialog line into Zomdeutsch. Having a background in computer programming, I implemented a tool that would do just that. The algorithm was actually pretty simple:
1. Start with English dialog lines written specifically for the zombies. Many of the lines were actually clues to solving the puzzles.
2. Have it professionally translated into German.
3. Pseudo-reverse the characters of each while preserving very specific consonant and vowel sets that – to English speakers – make it “sound German.”
4. Record a few of our German battle chatter actors (and some vocal Talent specializing in “creature voices”) reading the Zomdeutsch lines.
5. Add minimal audio processing.
It was pretty funny how hard the very tenacious Zombies fans tried to figure out what they were saying; I’m not sure if anyone ever actually did.
MASA: Can you tell us about your approach to the sound on Dead Space? How did you go about making it quite so scary?!
DON: Well first of all, I’ve always been a huge fan of the Horror genre. I was also lucky enough to get to collaborate with an extremely passionate Executive Producer, Glen Schofield, who also loved the genre and that fully supported and actively prioritized the use of “sonic story-telling.” When I first joined the team, I told him that if we were serious about re-creating the mood and adrenaline rushes that were done in the AAA horror movies, then we couldn’t simply “trigger awesome sound effects, creepy ambience, and scary music.” We absolutely needed real-time system that would allow musicians and sound designers to create content that, during playback, could adapt to what was going on in the game at every moment. It just so happened that prior to joining the Dead Space team, I had a stint as an Audio Development Director, and had just pushed through a deal with EA’s Legal team and Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and Pure Data (PD) and had already started using it in the then new Maxis title, Spore. So naturally, I assumed we could use this system for Dead Space… until the lead Engineer on the project saw the code. While PD was great for creating sound and music offline and worked out fine for Spore, it was simply too resource-hungry for what we were trying to do visually and interactively on consoles we were targeting for Dead Space. But Glen continued to support me on this and worked with Engineering who agreed to support “Lua,” a fairly standard game scripting/programming language. This was the first time I felt like sound designers actually had “full control” of their sounds and music. Now we could do typical horror tricks by doing thing like attaching “fear emitters” to each enemy creature that could control the soundscape to emulate what “linear” sound designers and composers did in movies. While we did have some AAA sound design and music in Dead Space, I don’t think we could have ever pulled it off without a real “audio programming language.” Now we could focus on the content: creepy ambiences, scary music, awesome sound design, believably primal creature vocalizations, “jump scares & feints,” aural contrast, and most of all… the judicial use of silence.
MASA: Can you tell us anything about what you’re working on currently?
DON: A few years ago, just after we shipped Advanced Warfare, I felt the time was right to pass the torch and step aside as Audio Director to one of most talented and deserving people I know, Dave Swenson. But… I wasn’t quite ready to retire. I realized that what I really wanted to do was get away from the barrage of emails, spreadsheets, and the solid wall of meetings on my schedule, and instead get back in the trenches of game dev. So, I worked as an individual content contributor through our next dev cycle. Then after we shipped WWII, Dave and I discussed our dire need to improve our audio pipeline, and specifically the need for some much more modernized audio development tools. To that end, I (quite excitedly) agreed to shift gears completely and became a full-time audio tools engineer… which ironically is a full circle back to the very role I started out in back at EA 29 years ago. These days, I have far fewer meetings and spreadsheets to worry about and can focus the bulk of my workdays “back in the trenches,” working from my home studio on the Foster City lagoon. (Ahhh…)
Another long-awaited full circle is that I finally got back into what got me interested in interactive audio to begin with: Generative Music. Over the last few years, I’ve developed my own real-time adaptive/generative music composition system (including some interesting DSP) from ground up that can generate some pretty cool and multi-style music from Funk to Jazz (and some of it actually doesn’t suck that bad ;-). Here’s a link, in case you’d like to check it out:
https://soundcloud.com/dveca/sets/generative-jazz
MASA: And finally, can you tell us what you were looking for when judging this year’s Music+Sound Awards??
What I was looking for is the same things I look for when judging any form of aural media, be it games, movies, or television:
1. A clean, focused mix.
2. Originality in both music composition and sound design.
3. Solid voice acting.
4. Overall believability.
5. Thoughtful and effective sonic story telling.
6. A well-integrated emotional experience through use of impactful sound design and music that reaches out and touches your soul.
MASA: Well Don, that was a truly fantastic insight into your world there. Thank you very much. Has been wonderful having you on the panel this year.
