Targeting Your Audience With the Trailer's Sound Effects

Sound effects can help sell your game to your target audience in ways all the other parts of the trailer cannot. Sound effects are essential to game trailers just as they're essential to the games. Every time someone asks me to critique a trailer which has no sound effects in it I half-jokingly ask: What does your sound designer think of that?

I'm not talking about the trailers where every gunshot is cut to the beat or the movie trailer style sound design of booms, whooshes, rises, hits, swishes, drones, and braaaaams. I'm talking about game specific sounds which press buttons, especially nostalgia buttons.

Superfuse is a Diablo-like game with a lot of elements which are taken directly from the game. The pro of this sort of design is a lot of it will be familiar to fans of the original game. But the con is that if the game doesn't look or play differently enough from the original game, it won't feel worth playing. But part of my theory of game trailer editing is make sure the audience knows the genre space of the game as soon as possible so I can then use most of the trailer to show what the game does differently from its inspiration.

The first way I do this is by creating shots which have camera angles, animations, and other elements which feel like they're of the same genre. In this case, there's one sound effect which I made sure my sound mixer made loud and clear. 

A coin flip sound.

You can hear it in the first shot of the trailer and in another at approximately 8 seconds. In Diablo, one of the sounds you'll hear most often is a coin flip sound which plays when you come across any money. It can be from opening a treasure chest or defeating a monster. It's usually followed by another sound effect which is loot landing on the ground in the form of weapons, armor, or other items. In Superfuse, the coin sound effect felt like a direct call to Diablo fans, which is why I deemed it so important to the opening montage of this trailer. I didn't hinge the entire understanding of the genre on this one sound, but it was a contributing factor. In my ideal scenario, Diablo fans get this positive memory triggered by this sound and then are ready to see this new iteration on the Diablo formula.

Another sound opportunity came up with this reveal trailer for Map 5 of Among Us. We knew this was going to play to a captive audience during an online event, so before the Among Us crewmates are revealed a few seconds into the trailer we used the menacing Among Us music to introduce the shadow of the space ship flying over the crab creature. This way people wouldn’t know what the trailer was for 4 whole seconds, and then people in the know would know instantly, and everyone else less familiar with Among Us would know around the 12 second mark (unless they’re completely unfamiliar with Among Us). Taking advantage of that deep association with the sound was just one way to really connect with the audience!

My most satisfying sound effect inclusion in a trailer I've worked on is in the trailer for Half-Life: Alyx. The Half-Life games have some incredibly iconic sound effects which we knew HAD to be in the trailer in a significant way. It would've been easy enough to include them as incidental background noise or just one part of a shot, but I knew this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to really press those nostalgia buttons.

The first is the health recharging sound which comes at the 0:49 mark. Extra attention is directed to this sound because at this point in the trailer the music has dropped out following the joke with Russell throwing a loaded pistol out the window. I'm not even the biggest Half-Life fan, but that sound is so memorable I knew we had to make a big deal out of this small thing.

The second nostalgic sound effect is the drawn out tone when the Combine soldier is killed at 1:04. There's literally a countdown preceding this sound effect. Since it plays out over a black screen there's literally nothing else you can be paying attention to at this moment. A music stopdown and cut to black is a very typical convention of modern trailer editing, but I like that we could put a Half-Life flavored spin on this moment. 

I think Black Philip was already an icon of this film before it came out because of this trailer.

Modern movie trailers often find a few sound effects to act as the identity of the film and/or trailers, but I feel like games have even more opportunities to use game sounds as brand identity markers because when we play these games we hear these sound effects constantly during play. Some sounds even break into other games because of stock sound effects being used across games. This is what happened to the Tactical Breach Wizards trailer which uses the same klaxon sound from Among Us at the 0:48 mark. During the PC Gaming show livestream, that sound effect prompted chat to start typing in: AMONG US!!!

Of course, most games are not fortunate enough to be so well regarded that hearing the sound effects instantly conjures images of the game. But if you find yourself in a situation where the fans are that clued into the sound design of the game, that's a golden opportunity to spice up the trailer with those nostalgia crystals and press all of those buttons. 

That said, it's still worth making your game's sound effects stand out even if you're working on a game no one knows about. It could still become a signature sound even before the game is ever released. Re-read my blog post about movie trailer sound design and think about places where you'd put in those sounds, but use your game audio instead to augment the edit, and you can make your trailer more unique to the game!