From a second floor auditorium in Rensselaer’s West Hall, programming students listened to one of the most accomplished gaming audio engineers in the Western Hemisphere.
On a campus built on the reputation of engineering leaders who built America’s space program, Leonard Paul looked more Greenwich Village in trendy black boots, black pants, black tee and a newsboy cap, as he spoke of McCartney, Reznor, sprites and kilobytes. Paul is at arm’s length from a MacBook containing a digital presentation that juxtaposed the wooden and plaster surroundings of an auditorium built when Ulysses S. Grant sat in the Oval Office.
Paul is the principal instructor for The School of Video Game Audio in Toronto and has been in the industry since 1994. He has worked on games you’ve likely played – award-winning titles such as “NBA Jam 2010,” “NHL 11,” “Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2,” “NBA Live ’95.” He’s been responsible for composing, sound design and audio coding on more than twenty major game titles that have sold in aggregate of 6.4 million units.
The initial shock associated with the thought an RPI student, who faces a price tag of $48,100 a year for an education, was whisked away when Paul revealed video gaming revenues rake in as many billions of dollars as that of Hollywood films – $91.5 billion in revenue earned in gaming, to $88.3 billion earned in film. Perhaps the knee jerk reaction towards gaming would be due to parents, who are unfamiliar with today’s games, remembering the blips and whistles of old gaming consoles.
“In a somewhat odd way, you can see film as a subset of video games, where the visuals and the sound don’t respond to the player,” said Paul. “Many films have a lot of CGI in them and the real-time graphics possibilities for games is so high these days that they can be seen as merging on a technical level in terms of graphics. This is also true for audio as well.”
Paul’s experience in gaming spans across a pioneering era within the industry. A child of the ’80s, he started synthesizing music on his family’s Commodore 64. “My love for music definitely came before coding,” said Paul. “I remember being very young and enjoying making music for fun with my classmates in preschool. Coding was a great way for me to learn the details of how computers work and has given me a lot of confidence with having job security.” Gaming audio hardly evolved beyond the 64 kilobytes of the Commodore by the time he started his career in 1994. At that point, Nintendo Entertainment’s Super Nintendo (SNES) and SEGA’s Genesis game consoles dominated retail sales. Both consoles still utilized cartridges with limited capacity for programming. The original 8-Bit Nintendo’s hardware from 1983 had less than a half dozen channels available for sound allowing little beyond blips, bass, treble and limited amounts of sampled sounds. Thirty years later, when SONY released its Playstation 4 console, utilizing software housed on Blu-Ray disc, it boasted more than 512 channels broadcast through HDMI 7.1 audio capabilities.
“When you think of game audio