How ‘Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’ Gets Its Gorgeous Sound
Almost every day now, I’ve been stuck in an endless cycle of playing the new Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown game until I was too tired, vowing to sleep earlier the next day, and, of course, refusing to learn my lesson. It’s just that good.
The Prince of Persia series has been a little hit or miss in the past. When this version was first announced, there was some concern that a 2D, side-scrolling game just didn’t seem like it would do the story or the characters justice.
Now that it’s finally out, reviews are glowing. And it’s got a lot of people pointing out that a game doesn’t need to be some huge, expansive, open-world adventure. Even a humble platforming game can beat out a huge AAA one if the story is compelling and the gameplay feels good.
And then there’s sound design, the unsung hero of games and a key reason why I love Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown in particular. The sound of Mario warping down a green pipe, the satisfying whoosh when you pull off a perfect parry in Legend of Zelda… these are my Roman Empires. To this day, I listen to a lo-fi gaming playlist when I want to have some quality focus time. There’s something special about the sounds and music that accompany you through a video game that makes you feel like a main character — in fact, that’s the goal.
“Good sound design is when you really make the players feel like they are living in their own movie, but they are the hero,” says Raphaël Joffres, a sound designer and music supervisor for Prince of Persia at Ubisoft.
“Since the very beginning, sound has always added a very tiniest slice of the cake in terms of the memory resource of the CPU,” adds Joffres.
But he notes the past three years have seen a growing interest from players about sound design, which saw console providers respond to it by updating their hardware. “You saw stuff like PlayStation having a dedicated chip for audio,” he says, “and it’s starting to open some new doors in terms of what we can do.”
Games also take a lot of cues from the film industry in many ways, including with sound and music production. But it gets a little more complicated when the game doesn’t follow a traditional linear timeline.
“I think we have like 40 years of experience in video games, but more than a century with movies,” says Joffres. “For films, stories play out on defined timelines, so you can create a very cool sound effect that works during a specific time in a film and it’s okay.”
“The thing is, in video games, it’s totally real time,” adds Slimane Dellaoui, another sound designer who worked on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. “Creating your song is a new approach, a new paradigm. In video games, you have to think about loops. It’s completely out of our control because the player does what he wants, you know?”
The fact that accounting for a player’s free will is one of the most difficult things about game sound design makes me uncomfortably aware of my own existence. But it also makes me thankful that there’s clearly a lot of work and care that goes into creating a game’s immersive soundscape – and its legacy. Wii theme music, you’ll always be famous.
Image: Ubisoft