Battlezone was released in 1980 as was designed by Atari. It used vector graphics. The sound board used was Atari's own POKEY Audio which was designed by Doug Neubauer. The POKEY sound board has 4 audio channels which was a revolution of the time, allowing polyphony for games. In the case of Battlezone you can clearly hear the 8 and or 16 bit sound (as the POKEY can have either 8bit or 16bit channels). The tank noises and shooting are clearly a noise generator through a high pass filter. The radar blips and victory music are realised through square tones. Other sounds that warn of approaching enemys are square tones through relatively slow frequency modulation.
References:
Haines, Christian. Lecture. "Intro into Sound Design." Adelaide University. 31/7/08
McDonald, Glenn. 2002, A brief timeline of Video Game Music, 2007,
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/vg_music/.
Video game music, 2007, 2007,
1 comment:
the tank noise sounds like a low pitched saw wave.
but genius game, i'd forgotten it was actually a coin-op.
and those vector graphics !!! OMG.
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