Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound

Dir: Karen Collins

2016

**

Karen Collins's Beep: A Documentary History of Game Sound is so nerdy, it made me want to do 1000 one-handed push-ups, a million bench-presses and go down to the beach and kick sand in the face of 6 stone weakling. I'm a nerd, a big nerd, but this was way beyond my geek credentials and into a realm of otherworldliness (othernerdiness). I'm a huge fan of the 16 bit systems, I started out on 8 and I'm still uncomfortable to go beyond 32. This documentary appealed to me greatly, classic gaming is nothing without the sound and music, as mind-numbingly awful as a lot of it is. I thought, if they can make a thrilling documentary about the worst game ever made and spend around 50% of that movie digging up buried rubbish (Atari: Game Over) then surely they could achieve the same, if not more, when exploring the history behind all the beeps and blips that were as much the soundtrack of our childhoods as Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Cyndi Lauper and A-ha were (I'm showing my age here). Unfortunately,  A Documentary History of Game Sound is as exciting as it initially sounds and unless you have a degree in sound engineering, it will probably fly right over your head. The film is just shy of two hours long and contains around eighty talking head interviews with composers and sound effects people. I'm not an expert in the field but the two or three big names I am aware of (Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, Rob Hubbard) weren't featured and neither were any of the games themselves. Worst of all, hardly any of the sound effects or music discussed was heard or directly analysed. It's like making a documentary on Communism and never once mentioning Lenin, the October revolution or indeed Communism. The film is basically talking heads, of people you've never heard of, talk about programming, in various badly dressed hotel rooms around the world. Maybe that's what the hard-core games music enthusiasts want, I would guess they probably already know about what was discussed but I can appreciate that certain people will enjoy listening to this jargon. But surely they could have made it more interesting to watch? Show some game-play, certainly play some of the music and at the very least, interview people from a different angle or the opposite corner of the hotel room. To be fair, for the Japanese interviews they did swap a table with a lamp on it for one interview with a ladder (lit with a blue light) for the next. If listening to the extremely irritating looped bleep music from the early days of gaming weren't enough to make you want to kill yourself, then this documentary should do the trick. I don't like to stereotype people but my goodness these people are every bit as boring as you'd expect them to be. It's a niche subject I guess, but many documentary subjects are, success is measured by how well they reel people in who have no knowledge or interest in it in the first place. People feed on other's enthusiasm, there are many of us who are entertained by the exploits of those obsessed with low-brow pleasure, especially when there is plenty of nostalgia to be had, but this film is a dead horse. Imagine listening to The Adventures of Rad Gravity (seriously, check it out) on a loop for 24 hours and you still won't be as tortured as much as you would be sitting through 110 minutes of Beep.