GameSoundCon Marks 15th Anniversary

Seattle, WA (September 26, 2024)—The popular GameSoundCon conference for video game music and sound design is celebrating its 15th anniversary in the lead up to its next event at the end of October.

The first GameSoundCon took place in September, 2009 at the Century Hyatt in Los Angeles, with around 40 attendees and 12 speakers and panelists, and was targeted primarily at those “Hollywood” composers who wanted to learn about opportunities in game audio. Over the past 15 years, GameSoundCon has grown into what the organization says is the industry’s largest professional conference on game music, sound design, dialogue and education, attracting seasoned game audio professionals and novices alike.

GameSoundCon started when Brian Schmidt, who had been creating video game music and sound effects for companies like Electronic Arts, Capcom, Namco, Sega, and others for many years, joined the original Xbox design team at Microsoft. One of his roles was to educate composers and sound designers on the intricacies of creating interactive music and sound effects for the specialized and powerful Xbox audio hardware. At that time, the game industry was attracting the attention of traditionally ‘linear’ composers and sound designers from the film and TV industries, who had little or no experience in games.

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In working with those aspiring game composers, Schmidt realized there was an education gap. Composers and sound designers wanted to work on games, but didn’t understand the unique challenges of creating interactive music and sound, so he decided to create a conference dedicated to sharing knowledge on video game music and sound design. The idea was to give those coming from a more traditional music background an intensive boot camp to learn the many differences between creating sound for games and creating sound for film or TV.

Having since relocated the annual event from downtown L.A. to the Marriott Burbank Convention Center in Burbank, CA, GameSoundCon now has over 130 speakers sharing their knowledge and experience across seven rooms and attracts more than 700 in-person attendees with another 350 attending remotely from around the world. This year’s GameSoundCon will be held at the Burbank Convention Center on October 29 and 30.