As part of their competition prize Chris Green (Title screen attract/In-game music) and John-Paul (JP) Sweeney ( Sound effects ) got to enjoy a day at Rare HQ - meeting up with various members of the Rare team and getting all those Rare game titles signed by original dev team members!
We arrived at the imposing but anonymous Rare gate house at 09:15, followed the drive to the remote guest parking and strolled down to reception - the quiet countryside ambience shattered only briefly by a helicopter passing over head - jokingly identified by JP as a helicopter gun ship launched to check out the 'intruders'; somehow the Rare HQ, set in 90 acres of countryside, just has that top secret feel to it.
The Rare reception is full of glass display cases showing off the decades of game development and the evolution of hardware platforms - every game built and console/computer supported seemed to be represented giving plenty of 'oh wow', 'do you remember' moments.
Music composer extraordinaire Steve Burke and new community manager George Kelion hosted us for the day, along with awesome graphics dev Nick Burton. After quickly dumping our bags in Steve's tech filled office (4 monitors, 2 music keyboards, many PCs plus of course Xbox 360 and HD TV) we headed off on a walking tour of the building and grounds. Pic: L2R Chris, JP, Steve, George.
We then rendezvoused with Nick in the main Rare meeting room. Fully kitted out with 50" HD plasma and high quality surround sound system - plus comfy sofa of course. Nick showed off Jetpac Refuelled available on XBLA - JP didn't last long at level 121 - check out the game level descriptions for moments of humour!
The guys got plenty of time to talk technical about music and game integration with a walk-thru of Kameo Elements of Power in Xbox dev mode, played by Nick with commentary by Steve.
After lunch in the Rare restaurant the gang chilled to discuss the game/music dev cycle and 'how to get a job in the games industry' before heading to the music studio.
Here the guys got to see how the sound effects were laid down using Pro Tools with the sound designers for Kameo and Perfect Dark. Steve spoke more about creating the music for Kameo - working with a real orchestra and how the localisation of speech in games happens. We finished the day back in Steve's office chatting with Robin Beanland (Head of Music, Rare) over tea and cream cakes.
It was a great day for us and on behalf of Chris and JP, I would like to say a really big thank you to Steve, George and Nick and to all the folks at Rare who stopped by to chat.
I've asked Chris and JP to add their thoughts on the day in the comments to this entry - so over to you chaps!
