‘Overwatch’ Is Powered By Beer

  It’s interesting how the sound effects of movies and video games are made. Sometimes, there’s absolutely no freaking precedent at all for a particular noise, so you just pull something out of your ass and hope it sounds ‘right.’  

Take Jurassic Park. Nobody has ever heard the roar of a Tyrannosaurus. It might have made a lame-ass little squeak, like a gnat having a dump. It might. We’ll never know. What Spielberg did know was that he needed some big ol’ cinematic badassery for the film. The rex roar, in the end, is a combination of baby elephant, teeny terrier and who the hell knows what else.

The raptor sounds come from two tortoises screwing, apparently. And Resident Evil’s iconic head-popping sound comes from shooting cabbages. But we’d heard all that before. Now here’s a new entry to file in the drawer marked Sound Effects From Weirdly Weird-Ass Origins, courtesy of Overwatch.

The freshly-released shooter’s a huge deal at the moment, as you’ve probably noticed. It turns out that its hit-confirming sound is made by something else we can all get behind: beer.

As Kotaku reports, the Overwatch Collector’s Edition Source Book includes this brilliant little titbit from the game’s sound director, Paul Lackey:

‘Another extremely challenging sound was the ‘hit-pip.’ When you hit someone, you need to know you made contact. The sounds needs to cut through the mix but not feel like it comes from any hero. It went through tons of iteration. Finally, one night I thought, ‘It should be satisfying to hit an enemy.’ Just thing about what’s satisfying: beer. So I literally opened a beer can. Pssht. The sound is reversed and tweaked a little, but that sound is our hit-pip.’

So there it is. Maybe this calls for a new Overwatch drinking game, taking a swig each time you hear the ‘pip’ (Ego-disclaimer- don’t actually try this, it sounds both impossible and deadly).