With the release of StarCraft: Remastered, we’re increasing the number of languages StarCraft is available in from 5 to 12. We can’t change those sounds drastically, or anybody using them as cues is likely to make mistakes-and close off an avenue to victory. The distinct noise of Protoss photon cannons firing lets a player instantly understand what’s going on, and the frequency of blast sounds convey just how bad things are. StarCraft’s balance is no less delicate than its sound mix, and the team also needs to consider the impact of remastering audio on gameplay. Of course, that reservation hasn’t stopped Audio Production Director David Seeholzer from starting to build a life-sized model in his spare time. When it got changed, that scene just didn’t feel like the original any more. The original sound was totally -it seemed out of place, but it was so memorable that it became part of the franchise. It’s somebody making, “RAAAA RRAAAA RAAA,” noises with a big echo. In the remastered version, years later, they changed just that sound. “There’s a particular sound that makes in an early scene, something like ‘RRROOOOUUUUEEEE,’ that he uses to scare away. Sound Design Supervisor Evan Chen says that the remastering of a popular science fiction film served as a cautionary tale: Redoing any aesthetic decisions at all was forbidden.
Listening to one modified sound set at a time alongside the original recordings, they identified any individual files that seemed too far removed from the original, and pulled them back from the brink. The sound team working on the project, including QA Analyst Jake Davidson-lingo, developed a technique to heighten the fidelity of the original sound files to 44 kHz without radically changing the sound mix. No tweaks would be made to just a few race, unit or scene sounds at a time-every change should be made to groups of related sounds in unison. But to do so cavalierly could rob a sound of its authenticity, so the team set guidelines. When revisiting an established sound, it’s tempting to take any file that feels “old” and make it better.
STARCRAFT REMASTERED OST FULL
"If we had the original source material at its full fidelity, what would it sound like?" For most of the sounds in StarCraft: Remastered, we’ve doubled the audio sample rate to 44 kHz-boosting the game’s original audio files to expose the notes concealed within those earlier recordings. Some of StarCraft’s 22 kHz sounds chopped off higher frequencies or masked upper harmonics (tones produced by vibrations from fundamental notes, which can be heard separately from those fundamental notes). A higher sample rate generally produces a more accurate, fuller representation of the recorded sound. The original StarCraft used audio files at a 22 kHz sample rate (the number of samples of a sound taken per second when the sound is digitized). Throughout the development of StarCraft: Remastered, the goal of the Blizzard Sound Team has been to try and reveal-not reinvent-what the game sounds like. When we set out to remaster StarCraft, we decided that polishing its visuals and interface but leaving the audio in 1998 would feel extremely jarring, but radically changing the way the game sounds would be even worse.
Many are almost 20 years old-they’ve been recovered from the archives in a nearly-archaeological process, and enhanced to expose their hidden frequencies and take advantage of modern sound systems. Some of those sounds are entirely new, and presented in languages that StarCraft didn’t support when it was released in 1998. StarCraft: Remastered is composed of 2,381 total audio files, including unit dialogue and effects: roaring rockets, susurrating Zerg, and the sad bleep of deactivating Probes. It doesn’t do those things very well in the vacuum of space-but the Koprulu sector’s a noisy corner of the galaxy. It bypasses language barriers and affects us at a subliminal level.
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