The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim “The Sound of Skyrim” Developer Diary

A second developer diary for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is upon us, and this time the video segment features commentary from game director Todd Howard, audio director Mark Lampert, production director Ashley Cheng, and a few of the voice actors about the blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into creating the game’s music and sound effects. Christopher Plummer is going to be perfect in this:

And here’s a snip from the text portion:

Early on in a project, the footsteps Lampert most often records are those of his wife. When they couple is on vacation, hiking through the hills of a remote country, the microphone comes along for the ride.

(My wife has to put up with me stopping all the time. I’ve got a lot of recordings that begin with her footsteps walking off. You hear her walking away as I lag behind to get one minute of this bird or cricket or whatever.

“Hang on, hang on, I’ve gotta record this one button, it’s got a funny mechanical ping to it — that sounds like something we could use some day, in some game, somewhere.)

The gap between the release of one game and the maturation of the next provides the best opportunity to capture new sound. But because a game like Skyrim mostly comes together late into development, Lampert’s early work is more about building up a library of interesting sound that can be mined later in the project.

(It’s not always that we have something in the game and we need a sound for it and I’ll go out and record something for it. That happens, but it’s much more often the case of, ‘˜Here’s a weird sound, I may use that one day, we should have it in the library — I should just record it now.’

“And inevitably in a few weeks you’ll find some spot where you say, ‘I’ve got just the thing!’)