WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw Designer Diary #1

When THQ announced earlier this year that WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw for the PlayStation 2 would feature online play, it also confirmed its intention to use the actual voices of almost every wrestler featured in the game. The designer and producer charged with tracking down and sticking a microphone in front of the WWE Superstars was Andy Abramovici, and, as you'll read in his designer diary below, getting the job done was no mean feat.

Raw Talent

Hello, and welcome to this designer diary for THQ's SmackDown! vs. Raw. You probably would not have clicked this link unless you had at least a passing interest in wrestling games or the WWE, and I hope that what follows will sate some of your curiosity. By the way, my name is Andy Abramovici, and I am a designer and producer at THQ. My primary responsibility on WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw was to oversee all aspects of the story mode. What this diary will relay are some of my experiences in one of the most vital and dynamic aspects of the story mode's development: the voice recording of actual WWE Superstar talent.

The WWE Superstars' voices were recorded in around 20 different North American studios.

Usually, these designer diaries tend to deal with topics directly related to the design or implementation of key features. This diary is no exception, as we consider the voice-over elements in WWE SmackDown! vs. Raw a top-level feature. However, this may be a bit different from the typical diary in that it describes a guerilla-type mission, conducted not in the development studio, but rather in the recording studio. No, make that recording studios, as my journey led me to about 20 studios around the US and Canada. The mission: to record more than 40 WWE Superstars in six weeks' time. (FYI, many of these Superstars were asked to record more than 200 lines for us.)

When we began to plan this endeavor, my first thought was, "How hard can it be?" I mean, all we need to do is grab these folks, stick them in a studio, and let them do their thing, right? Well, this cavalier attitude fell by the wayside in a hurry as reality set in. There are all sorts of considerations that we discovered over the course of this project. Here are just a few:

1. Exactly where can we record? My adventure following the Raw and SmackDown! promotions took us from New Hampshire to Florida to Los Angeles to Vancouver. In between, it also took us to smaller cities such as Reading, Pennsylvania; Sudbury, Ontario; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and so on, and we had to find a suitable studio in each one. As you might imagine, the quality of the studios themselves varied greatly from spot to spot.

2. How can we ensure a consistent level of acoustic quality? Fortunately, we had a thoughtful recording plan to ensure that we had consistent equipment (mics, software, and so on) in each studio to normalize the audio quality as much as possible. Obviously, regardless of how many Superstars we had to record, we would have preferred to have done so in one spot. However, we knew from the get-go that the inherent nature of this project would prohibit that from happening.

The game will feature more than 40 WWE Superstars.

3. Superstar availability. It was tough enough to line up travel arrangements for myself (big props to Nicole McKeehan, who arranged THQ-side travel and assisted at the recording shoots) and arrange studio time, but at the end of the day, we had no idea how tough it would be to schedule the talent and coordinate the recording sessions around their time. See, until you try to book 40-plus WWE Superstars, you really have no idea of just how busy these guys are. I mean, they are on the road several days a week taping Raw and SmackDown1, performing at "house shows" (the two to three nontelevised shows each brand puts on each week), and taping bimonthly pay-per-views. On top of that, the Superstars themselves are so popular that any spare time they have is often devoted to personal appearances, WWE-sponsored appearances, film shoots, and, in some cases, book tours. Yes, we quickly found out that ensuring time, even a few hours, from each of our Superstars was going to be a significant undertaking.