The Beep Book: Documenting the History of Game Sound

The Beep Book is transcripts of interviews with over 100 game audio professionals from a range of areas of game sound’s history. The majority of the interviews were conducted as part of the Beep documentary film project by director and author Karen Collins. These are supplemented by interviews done for Video Game Music Online by Chris Greening. The book is ~410,000 words in length–a huge volume of material spanning decades of video game and pinball audio history. Interviews include artists such as Marty O’Donnell (Halo), George “The Fat Man” Sanger (7th Guest), Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy), Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts), and many, many more.

The interviews aim to explore the changing nature of game audio over time. Interviews are with people from all over the world, including Japan, USA, Canada & Europe, and took place from October 2014 to July 2016. They cover a range of expertise and experience levels, and include composers, sound designers, voice actors and directors, record labels, conductor, orchestrators, chip musicians, hardware and software creators, and more.

If you’re at all interested in game sound, or its history, we think you’ll find something of interest here. Many of the interviews have been or will be released as video content on our website, so feel free to preview some of them. Having them in a single book form means you’ve got them all in one place in a searchable, quotable format. If you’ve seen our Kickstarter campaign, you’ve seen the print books as two separate volumes. The e-book combines those two books into one easily searchable document.