August 15, 2016

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: Breakdown of Sound Design

I might be making a quiz game soon for a client, and I think I can learn from the design decisions of what has to be the greatest quiz game ever made, bar none: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. More specifically, the sound and music. The sound doesn't just get more ominous as the game progresses, the sound design is actually quite complicated with many surprising twists along the way.

$100, $200, $300, $500, $1,000 Questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4utAJ-JraE

At the beginning, there are two big "let's play" tracks for the start of the game at $100 and the continuation before $200. This is a fanfare that hones in the game at the beginning. The game as a whole is designed to be intimidating and make the player feel very uncomfortable. This makes winning high jackpots feel very rewarding. At the game's beginning, sound effects for wins are very unobtrusive and lightweight. The music is lighter, and bouncier, and more sensitive to wins. There are no sounds just for answering or playing because the assumption is you should be able to pass each question without trouble. It helps push players up and out of this section to move on to harder questions and bigger risks.

The surprise here is, why bother wasting time on questions you know people can answer? Shouldn't the whole game be intimidating? This section is included in the game to give it a fast start and a more dynamic introduction. You pull people in with these questions. You challenge them later on. Again, the real surprise here is that the soundtrack is actually more repetitive, less solemn, and less epic than the previous phase. You'd think the sound should get lonelier as you approach the top, but it doesn't. I believe this is, ironically, intended to push players closer to the $1,000,000 question faster by means of the anxious repetition, and from watching the show we know this is where many people screw up very quickly and drop back down to $32,000. The drama of the risk involved was soaked for all it was worth in the last phase, but now that the jackpot is so great, it would be much more interesting just to see someone just make it to that last question, and the faster, more repetitive music divides to accomplish both: it pushes the brightest to the top quicker while the lesser freefall sooner.



After the $1,000 mark, the music undergoes a dramatic change, getting much quieter, more ominous, and just selecting an answer now has a sound effect. Surprisingly, and I didn't realize this until after researching, every question's sound ascends keys in minor scale from $2,000 all the way up to $32,000. This is true for both the question's music and the final answer sound effect. You'd think the music should descend the scale, but the purpose of having higher sound as you progress is to indicate the rising jackpot, and the rising risks. The majority of the game is spent in this segment, squeezing the drama for all it's worth.



The $64,000 question marks another significant change as we go back to the bottom of the scale, this time with a different, more repetitive "heartbeat" soundtrack, interspersed with the ambient sitar for more atmospheric connotations. However, because the song is completely different, the change in scale is not as noticeable until the final answer sound effect at the end of the $64,000 mark. It is the same sound, same scale, same key as the $2,000 answer. Compared to the higher tone of the previous $32,000 question, this moment doesn't just mark the final phase as beginning, but as having already begun, and it catches everyone by surprise.


The final question is a doozy. It is the most repetitive, the most ominous, the most solemn, and of all the tracks heard by far it is definitely the darkest track of anything I've ever known. It's just a 3 second looping beat and a droning pad that never stops. It's easy to see why this choice was made as no other soundtrack could possibly be more conspicuous than a repetitive 3 second loop, but it flies in the face of game shows that try to make their larger prizes more like bonus rounds and fun, happy, crazy dances. This is not. This is the final question. There are no more questions after this. If you lose, you risk $468,000. If you win, you will be a millionaire.

Overall, the progression follows the show's intimidating and daunting experience, using key and soundtrack changes to push players through the easy questions, dramatize the difficult questions, and force them to fall quickly or climb to the top. The feedback is so subliminal, but very much intended by design as though it was a deliberate story. The complexity of Millionaire's sound design is something that many developers should learn from regarding how to use sound to set the drama of an interactive game into a story.

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