I am so God Damn sick and tired of TV and radio ads that use Atari 2600 sounds for video games!
“brng brng brng…oolee oolee oolee oolee! bo be bo be!”
Damn it, you idiots, these sounds are nearly THIRTY YEARS OLD now! Please, please, find something else, anything else to use for generic video game sounds!
Whew! Glad to get that out of my system.
What’s sad is, from that jumble of text, I’m almost positive you were referring to the 2600 PacMan game’s startup sounds, weren’t ya?
That sound has outlived the game it comes from by like 20 years now, hasn’t it? You still hear it used in movies, now and again.
This constantly irritates me. You would think someone on the sound crew would have noticed this glaring discrepency. Not to mention how people are always portrayed as playing video games. You’d think they were amshing fucking potatos instead of playing a game the way they use those controllers…
Which is closely related to Hollywood Screen Typing. You know, when a character in a movie puts his hands on a keyboard and just drums his fingers on them? You can tell if they doing this even if you can’t see their hands, because it sounds all wrong. They never hit the space bar, for one thing, and the rhythm is all off.
Back to the OP, there are a number of canned sounds I hear over and over in movies and TV. There’s a distinct Big Creaky Crypt Door sound, which was used in a couple of the Hellraiser movies, and a woman’s scream I last heard in the series promos for Firefly. And, of course, Pac-Man, which has to be the most iconic sound effect in the history of noise.
or, um, smashing, even…
The Aliens door closing sound is way over used to.
If you’ve ever seen The Score, at least they show a REAL gamer playing Quake 3.
“Oh no, you did NOT just kill me biatch! Now I’m pissed! Come get some!”
There’s a particular clip of fighting cats that’s been used over and over again. I remember it from a Disney record that I had as a child – “The Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House” – but it turns up in animation all over the place, Disney and non-Disney … .
Yeah, that’s the one. Another anachronism are the Space Invaders sounds used every time a TV show wants to depict video game weapons fire.
Oh, yeah, I’ve caught that one, too.
I think Miller’s onto something, there. It’s like there’s some arcane repository of sound files on some Hollywood Studio server, and when a videogame/computer sound is needed, they just download and insert the thing into the soundtrack, without checking what the hell they’ve got.
“Hey Fred, we gotta spice up that bit where the two leads are talking about hacking an ATM machine in the arcade. Get some ambients offa ftp:\Crusty.ass.old.noises.net wouldja?”
“Here we go! Fire.wav, Gamestart.wav, Levelcomplete.wav, and Bossmonsterkilled.wav. We’ll stick 'em in and loop the sound itermittantly, that oughtta do it.”
Fer fuck’s sake, people, check the “last modified” dates on those files… Find something recorded after 1986, willya?
And before I catch any heat for the above (I’m feeling a bit paranoid tonight… Space Paranoids!) I do not punch in my PIN number to get money from an ATM machine, just so I can pay some guy with cash to grind the VIN number offa my car’s engine block…
However, I’ll fess us that I didn’t misspell intermittently on purpose. 
How about that scream? It kinda sounds like “yeeeearrrrrrgh!” I’ve heard it in a couple video games and a couple of extreme-type commercials, like for Mountain Dew or something. Also some TV shows, I think.
Or the favorite in movies(usually low budget ) in which your supposed to beleive its a mod ren super computer and its a trs-80 or c64 repainted or soemthing
Or in hacker the scene where hes in his room and supposdely hacking soemthing and they edited all but 3 seconds of the aol sign on screen
Or the favorite in movies(usually low budget ) in which your supposed to beleive its a mod ren super computer and its a trs-80 or c64 repainted or soemthing
Or in hacker the scene where hes in his room and supposdely hacking soemthing and they edited all but 3 seconds of the aol sign on screen
Believe it or not, there’s a name for that one. It’s called “the Wilhelm scream”. Took some searching for me to find that name, too.
There’s a brief history of the Wilhelm scream, and an abundance of other movie sound cliches, at Film Sound Cliches.
Actually, let me correct myself before someone else does. The Wilhelm is a cliche scream, but it’s not the one you and I are thinking of. I’m still trying to find the origin of that one.
And don’t forget that one sound that big bad final head guy in Doom 2 makes when it fires out those monster-spawning cubes. Dunno how to “spell” the sound… Kinda whump-pa-whoosh. Heard it in so many damn movies and shows. Hell, I don’t even know if Doom 2 was the first to use the sound, it wouldn’t surprise me if it wasn’t.