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Would you briefly introduce yourself, please?
I entered Konami in the same year as Mr. Kojima - 1984. At first I was a programmer and I worked on the arcade version of Contra. Then I went to America and did Blades of Steel, an ice hockey game. Next, I moved on to the SFC and became the sound supervisor for Metal Gear. After that I did various things on arcade, PC Engine and Mega Drive. I first started workin with Mr. Kojima on Snatcher, then Policenauts and Metal Gear. What tools did you utilize for the sound? I use Konami's original sound editor program that runs on a PC. It's a kind of sequencer. I also have a synthesizer and a sampler as well. Most people create the sounds via a sequencer and then convert them to the PlayStation later, but I have my sound editor connected directly to my development PlayStation board so that I produce directly from the sounds put out from the PlayStation instead. In this way I can match the sounds to the PlayStation perfectly.
How did you create the sound effects? First of all, there's a special-effect library at Konami with around 300 CDs. On these CDs are most of the special effects that have ever been created for most of Konami's games up to now. We also have some general CDs containing sounds taken from old American movies. These ones are sold publicly - they aren't Konami's CDs. I can also take small looped samples, of about 0.3 to 0.5 seconds, and record them. Then I can modifty the musical interval and the noise in my sound editor. However, the only samples we took were for the helicopter and some of the guns. |
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There are a lot of guns in MGS. How did you make sure that they all sounded different?
The Socom pistol noise, for example, was already recorded on a library CD, but to use it as it was wouldn't have been very good. The sound of a gun in an American action movie is very different from the gun sound in a CD. In order to make it more like a cool movie sound, we needed to alter its sound wave. Did you sample any gun noises when you were in America? We didn't record noises with a DAT, but we did take a video when we practiced shooting at the firing range and that picked up the sounds of the guns. However, we couldn't sample from the video because the sound was completely different from what we needed. 
Is there a limit to how many sound effects you can use at the same time?
Yes, there is. The PlayStation has 24 sound channels of which eight are set aside for special effects, so we can only produce eight different sound effects at the same time. There's one scene where Snake is walking up the communications tower and the enemy guards are both above and below him firing at him. At this time you have the sound of everyone's weapons, the footsteps of three or four people and numerous bullets ricocheting off the walls. This is probably the most sound-intensive section in the game. How many sound effects are there in total? Not including sound effects in the demo and ignoring the numerous sound variations possible, there are still over 500 basic sound effects. Even the mice have four types of sound effects. There are so many that we can't hold them all in memory at the same time so we have to read in new sound effects off the CD about 30 times during the game. |
The helicopter noise. That took us a lot of time to get right, about a month. The basic sample we had was just one revolution of the helicopter's blade. From this we had to create all the sound effects for when the helicopter got closer and farther with the Doppler effect, and as it moved from the left to right, etc.
How difficult was it to sync the speech with the graphics and character mannerisms?
In order to emphasize the accent of the speech, it is necessary to move the mouth accordingly. We created a special program that alters the movement of the character to match the sound of their speech. Originally it was created just for Japanese speech, but it works for English as well. It works off volume, not words, so if they shout their mouths open wide, but if they speak softly their mouths only open a little. It works for animals as well. We created this tool especially for Metal Gear Solid.
Which sound effects are you most proud of?
This time we managed to convey the feeling of environmental depth and location to all the sound effects. For example, as the guards approach, you can hear their footsteps get louder and when they move around, you can hear whether they are on your left or right side. There are 64 different sound points going from left to right and 128 levels of volume. We created all the sound effects and put them in a table for the programmers. They then calculate the distance from Snake to the noise, determine how far left or right it is and lookup the corresponding sound in an index. This is very useful in Intrusion Mode, for example, when you're under a truck, because you can't see the radar. By listening carefully you can determine the guards' locations perfectly. I really recommend you listen to the game with stereo headphones.