A short history of the footstep in video game sound design, courtesy of Damian Kastbauer at LOST CHOCOLATE LAB. Nicely done!
Funny how it’s seemingly easier to project oneself into a 2-dimensional image experience when we have footsteps to connect us sensorially. Also interesting to consider how the initially crude sonics and synchronization of the footsteps (a consequence of technological limitation), parallels the history of footsteps in early silent and (later) ‘talking’ cinema. Here, technological limitation encourages the use of less realistic and more abstracted sounds as footsteps – think woodblocks, coconut shells, or plucked strings ‘mickey mousing’ to the picture from the movie house orchestra ‘pit’ – which test and pull at the connective tissue between sound and image in a way that we haven’t really had since the maturation of sound in cinema.
Richard C. Windeyer 