On the PlayStation 2, every shipped copy of Burnout 2 had exactly 72 seconds of audio to work with. That's 72 seconds total — covering every crash, every skid, every engine variation, every hover, every piece of streaming music, and every streaming buffer.
Burnout 2 shipped with over 30 seconds of bespoke audio for each crash. Every collision you trigger in the game plays a unique set of impacts, deformations, and slow-motion audio. Adam Hawkins and his team at Criterion Games pulled that off by treating the 72-second limit not as a constraint but as a puzzle. You crash. Three seconds elapse before you can crash again. In that three-second window, the game quietly yanks the previous crash's audio out of memory and streams in a new variant from disc, ready for your next collision.
Audio budget: two megabytes of RAM. That was the entire audio envelope for one of the most sonically ambitious games of the PlayStation 2 era.
Zebra Home Cinema spoke to Adam Hawkins, a veteran game audio programmer whose credits span Burnout (Criterion), Black (Criterion), Operation Flashpoint, F1, DiRT, Race Driver: Grid, MotoGP (Climax), Rally Masters 2, and an unnamed DJ game that Activision's legal team would prefer not be named again. In a wandering, technical, genuinely funny conversation, he walked through what game audio actually is and why it's almost always misunderstood.
From Rally Masters 2 to Criterion — The Career
Hawkins's first professional game-audio credit was *Rally Masters 2, a title made on such a modest budget that some of its engine recordings were sourced — bluntly — from Colin McRae Rally 5*.
"I said, I can't get these recordings of transmission whine and skidding. I don't have it. So I nicked them out of Colin McRae 5. I said to the guy: I need an email from you telling me to do this. There is no way I'm doing this off my back."
He joined Codemasters later, and the conversation inevitably came up. "When I went to work for Codemasters they went, yeah, we noticed. And if the game had sold at all well, we were coming after you. But it didn't, so we didn't bother."
The career progression that followed is instructive:
- ▪Criterion Games (Burnout, Black) — the studio Hawkins credits for maturing his practice. Criterion had Europe's first purpose-built custom-designed 5.1 studio, with walls deliberately a couple of degrees off level to prevent standing-wave reflections.
- ▪Climax (MotoGP on the original Xbox) — a studio so modest that Hawkins set up the five-speaker surround system in a cleaning cupboard because it was the only available space.
- ▪Codemasters — where he rose into senior positions on F1, DiRT, Race Driver: Grid, and other flagship racing titles. He famously taped posters over the glass walls of his meeting-room office because the reflections interfered with monitoring. Management kept asking him to take them down.
- ▪Sumo Digital — a studio that solved the monitoring problem by giving him a literal sample shed in the middle of an open-plan office.
The trajectory he described — from one-bloke-in-a-cupboard to proper dedicated studios with recording rooms and demonstration spaces — is also the trajectory of the game-audio industry itself. Over roughly a decade, game audio graduated from a lone specialist with headphones to a full craft department with leads, juniors, outsourcing pipelines, and purpose-built spaces.
The 72-Second Problem — How Burnout Did So Much with So Little
The constraint that defined Criterion's work on the PlayStation 2 era: two megabytes of RAM for audio. Everything fit inside that, or it didn't fit at all.
"Burnout 2 shipped with 72 seconds of audio. That's it. 72 seconds. That has to cover everything. Streaming buffers, music, every crash, every skid, every engine, every hover. That's it."
The team's technique was to treat memory as a rolling resource rather than a fixed inventory. Crash audio — the most memory-heavy category — was handled with a three-second post-crash lockout during which the game would swap the previous crash's audio out of memory and stream a new crash variant in from disc. Every collision the player triggered felt unique, because the audio behind it genuinely was.
"Every time you crash it sounds different. Every crash has a pack of about 30 seconds of audio and we would stream specific slow-mo and fast audio. So there was this real tactical push."
The contrast with modern game audio is absurd. A current AAA title might ship with 50+ gigabytes of audio alone. Burnout got the same experiential impact with four orders of magnitude less content by being far more clever about how the content was deployed.
"To Have Loud, You Must Also Have Quiet"
The single most useful craft principle Hawkins cited in the entire conversation:
"To have loud, you must also have quiet."
He borrowed this from a cinema sound designer the Criterion team hired for a consulting gig on one of their projects. The phrase became the team's north star.
Previous games, Hawkins noted, had been loud all the time — maximum output for every moment of gameplay. Burnout was one of the first games to deliberately treat dynamic range as a design tool. The engine audio was pitched at −18 dB relative to reference (the same level used for dialogue in film mixing). Crashes — when they hit — hit at full scale, with an impact you could feel through the floor if you were playing on a properly-specified home system.
Hawkins took home a late-stage build to test it.
"I crashed for the first time and my house shakes and I'm like — what will the neighbours think? I've just exploded, I don't know what. So −18 dB is quite a quiet bit of a film and then someone's like cue the nuclear explosion — and that was driving to crashing."
The consumer reality: most people played Burnout at low volume on their living-room TV and missed the dynamic range entirely. One reviewer called during early access to ask Hawkins to turn down the engines and crowds because he couldn't hear the game at volume 3 on his TV. The real answer — crank the volume up to where your neighbours complain, because that's how the game was intended to sound — has always been the uncomfortable truth about game audio worth producing properly.
The Black Demo Trick — Why Loud Rooms Sell Games
Criterion's gunplay game *Black* was, in Hawkins's assessment, one of the rare games where audio was the standout feature rather than an afterthought.
The team's demo strategy for Black was aggressive. They showed the game to press and publishers in a soundproof room, with a large Blu-sky display, cranked genuinely too loud, with no conversation permitted during the playthrough.
"There was no talking while you were playing the game. There was no going wow, this is great. You were immersed in huge screen, blastingly loud audio, probably too loud. But they came out going really amazing, that sounds so good. And I'm like — it does, mostly. It's loud. You can't tell."
The demo principle: the context of the listening environment is part of the product. The same game demoed quietly in a shared office reads as good audio. The same game demoed loudly in a sealed room reads as spectacular. This is not cheating — it is the honest version of the product, presented in the environment it was actually designed for.
What Film Sound People Get Wrong About Games
Criterion regularly interviewed people from film backgrounds who wanted to cross into games. Most of them struggled, according to Hawkins, in specific ways:
- 1.Linearity assumption. Film sound designers work with a fixed timeline. An explosion happens at exactly 1:23:47. Before it, the mix ducks all other sound; at impact, everything hits maximum; after, everything recovers. Game audio cannot do this. The explosion's timing is controlled by the player. The mix has to react to events that have no fixed position.
- 2.Scale assumption. Film audio has minutes and hours of unrestricted runtime. A feature film might use 150+ audio channels, 40+ hours of source recordings, and effectively infinite memory for the final mix. Game audio ships in a RAM-constrained executable with a hard memory ceiling. "Oh, 50 megs, whatever" is a film thought. Game audio teams count bytes.
- 3.Directional assumption. Film audio is mixed for a specific speaker configuration in a room at a specific listener position. Game audio has to work for every possible listener position, through whatever hardware the user owns, with the player turning the camera in real time. A sound effect that works for one virtual position has to be re-rendered dynamically for every other.
Hawkins's team on Black actually experimented with predictive audio ducking — anticipating an event a moment before it happened, ducking the rest of the mix, then releasing as the event hit. When they got the prediction right, the result was genuinely cinematic.
"There's one point that the sniper is shooting at you. Fires. You hear the crack. And then I knew — and I got the delay, the pretend travel of the bullet by a second. So it all goes quiet. And then the gravestone explodes next to you. I got to duck all the sound."
The ProLogic 2 Era — And the Moment the Sphere Stopped Working
Before Dolby Atmos, games used Dolby ProLogic 2 for surround-capable consumer playback. ProLogic 2's encoding technique: play the same sound on left and right with phase inverted, and the decoder projects it to the rear; play it with phases matched, and the decoder projects it to the front.
This worked beautifully for static directional cues. It broke down the moment you tried to pan something from above the listener.
"You've got two cars. One's like this. A car goes past. You want to go front to back. You can't do that. The sound effect would have to do this sort of bubble sound."
Criterion were a ProLogic 2-certified studio — a rare distinction at the time. Their workaround for the overhead-pan problem was literally to design sounds that spiralled around the listener rather than traversing them, because a true overhead pan was decoding-impossible.
The Xbox's native 5.1 surround eliminated the workaround. The PlayStation (original) had no surround concept at all. Developers of the era had to specify games that worked across all three configurations, which forced audio design into the lowest-common-denominator that every playback hardware could decode.
Everything Is Smoke and Mirrors (Including Backwards Audio)
One of Hawkins's favourite refrains: game audio is entirely fake, and the skill is in hiding the fake convincingly.
A worked example: Race Driver: Grid's rewind feature — one of the first racing games to let players rewind time after a crash. When an online forum asked how Criterion had implemented backwards playback of audio (MP3 audio cannot be played in reverse; it's psychoacoustically impossible), the answer was simple:
"The way we did it is we recorded a whole bunch of sounds backwards and played them. So it was just this noise that we played with a bunch of backwards impacts. So you think it's playing it all backwards, but it's really not."
This is the discipline. Once you get into games, Hawkins said, you realise everything is smoke and mirrors. That fog box — doesn't exist, it's a sprite. That transition to the next level — you faded to black and nothing happens, it's all snowblowers. That backwards audio — it's just forwards-played reversed samples.
The skill isn't in making a thing genuinely simulate the real world. It's in making the player believe it does.
The DJ Game You Can't Name — And 20 Real London DJs
Hawkins has also been an audio lead on an unnamed DJ game, made by FreeStyleGames (the studio behind DJ Hero and DJ Hero 2). Activision's legal team has asked him, in writing, not to name the specific title he worked on.
Whatever the title, the project used 20 real working London DJs to perform all the in-game scratches, mixes, and live sets. Some of them were former DMC World Championship competitors and professional battle DJs of genuine pedigree.
"They were insane. Proper DMC champions. These are just mind-bogglingly good DJs. Way beyond where I can sort of make crap and scratch. But they were fantastic."
Hawkins himself had been a vinyl DJ since 1992 — Technics 1210s, Citronix mixer, real-vinyl battle practice. His particular frustration with modern DJ culture is the pretence of involvement: performers on stage with a MacBook, pretending to touch knobs that aren't doing anything, while the set is auto-sequenced. He referred specifically to a Nottingham gig six years before the interview where a venue had promised Technics decks and then offered CDJs instead.
"I'm doing everything I can — beat matching in five to ten seconds, touching the vinyl, flipping it, it's real. And the next case is, the guy after me pulls out a MacBook, squints at it, clicks, the tune plays, he stands there for a couple of minutes, clicks, plays the next one."
Wipeout as the Watershed — When Games Stopped Being Nerdy
Hawkins's big-picture view of gaming culture centres on a single title: *Wipeout* (Psygnosis, 1995).
"Before Wipeout, gaming was not cool. Gaming was for nerds and losers and freaks. And then suddenly, you could come back from the pub and pop it on — what's this, what's the PlayStation? Yeah, got Leftfield, got The Prodigy, got Crystal Method."
Wipeout put electronic music licensed from the defining club acts of the 90s directly inside a launch-title PlayStation game. Overnight, gaming shifted from adolescent-bedroom hobby to adult living-room leisure. Within a decade, Doom and Halo were on billboards. Gaming became mainstream culture, and audio was one of the crucial bridges that carried it there.
Key Takeaways
- ▪Adam Hawkins is a veteran game audio programmer with credits across Burnout and Black (Criterion), MotoGP (Climax), Operation Flashpoint, the Codemasters racing catalogue (F1, DiRT, Race Driver: Grid), Rally Masters 2, and an unnamed DJ game from the FreeStyleGames studio.
- ▪Burnout 2 on the PlayStation 2 shipped with only 72 seconds of total audio and roughly 2 MB of RAM for audio — yet every in-game crash has a unique 30-second audio pack, achieved by swapping crash content in and out of memory from disc during a three-second post-crash lockout window.
- ▪The single most important sound-design principle Hawkins learned from a cinema audio consultant: *"To have loud, you must also have quiet."* Dynamic range is a storytelling tool, not an accident. Burnout mixed engine audio at −18 dB (film dialogue level) specifically to leave headroom for crash impacts.
- ▪Game audio is entirely fake, and the skill is hiding the fake convincingly. Race Driver: Grid's rewind-audio feature used pre-recorded backwards samples rather than actually playing MP3s in reverse (which is psychoacoustically impossible).
- ▪Film sound professionals moving into games struggle specifically with non-linearity (no fixed timeline), scale (tight memory budgets), and dynamic directional rendering (the player controls the listening position).
- ▪Wipeout (1995, Psygnosis) was the watershed title that made gaming culturally respectable — putting Leftfield, The Prodigy, and Crystal Method directly into a launch PlayStation game and transforming gaming from adolescent pastime into mainstream adult leisure within a decade.
- ▪The game-audio industry matured across roughly a 15-year arc from "one bloke in a cleaning cupboard" to proper purpose-built studios, full craft departments, and industry-standard workflow — mirroring the broader professionalisation of video games as a medium.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Adam Hawkins?
Adam Hawkins is a British game audio programmer with a career spanning approximately two decades. His major credits include Burnout 2, Burnout 3, and Black (Criterion Games); MotoGP (Climax); F1, DiRT, and Race Driver: Grid (Codemasters); Rally Masters 2; Operation Flashpoint; and an unnamed DJ game from the FreeStyleGames studio. He is also a long-time vinyl DJ — practising since 1992.
How much audio did Burnout 2 actually ship with?
Approximately 72 seconds of total audio and roughly 2 MB of RAM to hold it — covering every streamed music track, engine variation, skid, crash, hover sound, and streaming buffer. The team achieved unique-sounding crashes by swapping 30-second audio packs in and out of memory from disc during a three-second post-crash lockout window. Every collision in the game plays a different audio variant than the previous one.
Can you play audio backwards in a game?
Not directly. MP3 and similar compressed audio formats are psychoacoustically impossible to play in reverse — the format's decoding relies on the forward temporal direction of the signal. When games need a "backwards audio" effect (like Race Driver: Grid's rewind feature), the implementation uses pre-recorded reversed audio samples played forwards, not genuine reverse-direction decoding.
What does "-18 dB dynamic range" mean in game audio?
It's the reference level used in professional film mixing for dialogue — meaning the average voice level in a film sits at −18 dB relative to the peak allowed by the format (0 dB full scale). Games traditionally mixed at close to 0 dB for everything, leaving no headroom for impact. Burnout's dynamic range approach — engines at −18 dB, crashes at 0 dB — gave collision impacts a physical weight that had been missing from racing-game audio.
Why is game audio harder than film audio?
Three main reasons. Non-linearity: games don't have a fixed timeline, so the mix has to react to player-controlled events. Scale: shipped games operate within tight RAM budgets where film audio has effectively infinite memory. Dynamic directional rendering: the listener position is controlled by the player in real time, so every sound has to be re-rendered for whatever position and orientation the player currently has. Film sound is mixed once; game sound is rendered continuously.
What is Dolby ProLogic 2 and how did games use it?
ProLogic 2 was a matrix-encoded surround format from the PS2/original-Xbox era. Its encoding used phase relationships between stereo channels to encode directional information — matched phase for front positioning, inverted phase for rear. It worked well for static directional cues but broke down on overhead pans (from in-front to behind a listener), which forced game audio designers to compose spiralling or arcing directional cues rather than direct front-to-back traversals. It was superseded by native multi-channel formats once consoles moved to discrete 5.1 and then Atmos.
Why did Criterion demo Black at uncomfortably high volume?
Because the context of the listening environment is part of the product. Demoed quietly on an office TV, Black's audio would read as merely "good." Demoed at genuinely loud volume in a soundproof room with no conversation permitted during play, the same audio became overwhelming and visceral — and that's how the team intended the game to be experienced on a properly-specified home cinema. The demo wasn't cheating; it was the honest version of the product presented in the environment it was designed for.
