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Hugh Edwards is confident that his audio outfit High Score Productions has precisely what it takes to give your project the ear-catching sounds it deserves.
Operating since 2004, High Score has provided audio – especially voice work and dialogue – to more than 140 titles, from triple-A all the way along to mobile.
“The main reason developers and publishers should come to us as an outsourcing company is that we do
25-plus games a year. The breadth of our experience is huge compared to those people who only work on one title every two years,” says Edwards, director of High Score.
“It’s also really important to have a voice director who is actually trained as a voice director, and who isn’t the guy who makes the coffee and does gameplay design, etcetera. Voice direction is a skill which is just as important as being a fantastic concept artist or a brilliant core coder – it’s a distinct and separate art, and more and more games companies are realising this. This is what we provide – experience, knowledge and skill, combined with passion.”
English, FIGS, Japanese, Polish, Russian and other languages are covered by the audio specialist, which is split between voice, music and sound production equally.
High Score employs voice directors and project managers to run complete and entirely embodied dialogue-production projects, and also grade eight musicians and heavily experienced sound designers.
High Score has also developed its own suite of tools to run dialogue projects.
“Game developers can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on developing their games, the engines, the graphics and so on,” continues Edwards.
“But if you don’t get the voice right, you can throw it all down the toilet. That’s why we pay so much attention to detail, casting and directing, recording, post-production and quality assurance. It’s hugely important. Sound is as much a kingpin of gaming today as graphics and gameplay.”
The audio production house has done dialogue projects such as Harry Potter for Kinect for Warner Bros and WarThunder for Gaijin Entertainment. It has worked on Enslaved for Ninja Theory, done sports titles such as Beijing Olympics 2008 for Sega and Moto GP for Konami, as well as wartime projects like Birds of Steel.
“We provide the best possible project management, recording talent and production skills, along with arguably the best voice direction in the country, to ensure that the investments made by the publisher and the developer are justified and built on, rather than hampered and spoiled. The result is, our clients keep coming back to us,” Edwards asserts.
High Score will continue developing its in-house tools to give it the edge technically and financially over its competition. And Edwards is in no doubt that he and his team with keep providing “fantastic” game audio.
“Our service is right for games developers because we are bloody good at our job – we do game audio, and we have the breadth of experience needed to be the leading audio outsourcer in the UK.”
