AES Journal Forum

Game audio career options fall in roughly two categories: audio programmers and sound designers.

Both either work in-house for a game development studio or as contract freelancers. They find jobs through networking, directly from studio websites, or from game industry job boards. Many studios have a revolving door of low wage quality assurance (QA) testers—ie people that play video games all day. While this may seem like the best job in the world, it is a lot of hours (10+) and Cheetos for little money ($10/hr). However, for an enterprising individual this can be a foot in the door to better opportunities in the studio.

Programmers are usually required to have a BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related engineering field.

Sound designers of course don't need any degree at all (though one is always wise to have a university degree). They generally start as interns or low wage workers ($10/hr) and work their way up. Alternatively they may jump from a closely related industry, like television post production, advertising, etc, where it may be easier to squeak a living as an assistant ($30k/year).

Mr. Moreno's question "...do you think that 8-bit sound techniques have become obsolete?" prompts me to say that I think the nature of the work has bifurcated since the old (pre-SoundBlaster) days. For "real" game platforms such as PCs, yes, higher-resolution sound interfaces are now ubiquitous, and the challenges have shifted towards the artistic and collaborative aspects of the game design described in the article.

At the same time, there is now an explosion of personal gadgets with tiny transducers (phones, WiFi devices etc.) which I think *do* still have a need for bit-miserly approaches (remember Mozer coding?) such as we used on 8-bit game machines. So low-bit-rate audio can't be dismissed as historical only.