About
What is this site?
This is a project to catalog which video games support surround sound, especially for older and less popular game consoles that don't get very much attention or documentation, as well as modern PC games (which shockingly have the same problem).
Wait, retro games had surround sound?
Yes! To explain it briefly, Dolby Surround encoding, which is processed by Dolby Pro Logic decoders, is a way of cleverly smuggling surround sound over an ordinary pair of red and white RCA connectors. I learned this mostly from Andrew Elmore's 2019 article, and have been obsessed since I read it. If you want an in-depth guide to how it works, I pretend that I understand some of this one, which also explains the improvements made in Dolby Pro Logic II.
Why is a site like this necessary?
Dolby did such an amazing job bolting surround sound onto connections that consumers already had, that knowing whether something even has surround sound isn't simple! Basically, a regular stereo connection carrying Dolby Surround audio would just sound like stereo if you didn't have a surround setup (or, importantly, if you didn't tell your AV receiver that it should be using DPL - it's not automatic). And because the setting you need to switch is on the receiver itself, many games that support it don't have separate settings for Stereo and Surround (some do, probably for slightly different mixing levels). And finally, many games that support this technology didn't say so on the box. Using the Dolby logo theoretically meant some combination of a developer relationship with Dolby, adhering to their standards, paying for licensing, and using official encoding tools; instead, developers unwilling or unable to satisfy these conditions still added surround sound to their games and told no one about it - a little treat for people with the right equipment.
Doesn't MobyGames have some of this information?
I know you didn't ask this one, but yes, it does! However, many (not all) of the undocumented games I've found are not listed there either. Since some are, it seems like that submission would probably be accepted, but it's not totally clear to me if that's the case, and no one answered me when I asked. Also, their submission process is arduous and takes a long time to be approved (a very small submission I made in 2022 took 4.5 months). I am not trying to start a competing database here, and my plan is to include info about whether their info matches mine.
What's your methodology?
My older game consoles are connected to a Sony HT-DDW990 system (receiver: Sony STR-K990). What I've found is that because Dolby Pro Logic (1) decoding requires certain sounds to be at certain decibel offsets and in certain phases, a given game usually either expands to 5.1 if it satisfies all conditions or collapses to 1.1 with all sound in the center speaker if it doesn't. Usually when it collapses like this, the other four speakers are dead silent. Sometimes I get results other than this, usually on a per-system basis, that I am still gathering more data to interpret (either they are doing surround poorly or stereo poorly and it is bleeding into surround). It's also worth noting I'm basically judging by the title screen music - if a baseball game has rear surround SFX when the catcher catches a pitch, my testing won't catch that (ha!), and you'll have to let me know to correct it.
One very important note is this testing cannot be done with Dolby Pro Logic II, nor Dolby Surround (the impossibly named 2013 decoder) because those technologies both expand all stereo content to 5.1 algorithmically. DPL 1 fails to do this, so it's the only one that can tell us the real encoding. I won't judge if you like the algorithmic expansion, but if I was satisfied with that, you wouldn't be reading any of this.
Here is a perfect pair of examples from the same system - Tetris with Cardcaptor Sakura: Eternal Heart, and Imadoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride for the PS1. Neither has any indication on the box or in the game of any surround sound. When I boot up Sakura in DPL mode, the tutorial is in 5.1 (4.1, whatever), clear as day, including the dialogue from Sakura accurately isolated to the center speaker. When I boot up Imadoki no Vampire, the entire intro anime movie comes completely through the center speaker with the other four speakers dead silent (though interestingly, the Atlus splash screen is in 5.1 before this part). It's clear here that Sakura has undocumented surround sound.
Can I contribute to the project?
Yes! I'm not set up for much of a collaboration nor financial donation yet, but the project is obviously richer for having either. If you can replicate my testing process for the same positive and negative results I have so far, I'd love more entries of info from you (and confirmation that my results hold up). In the future, if this takes off, there might be other ways to help as well. I'll also need to come up with a system that gives you fair credit for your contributions.
Who are you?
I'm Matt, a game developer from Chicago who loves this technology and has a perfectionism problem. When I got my surround sound setup, all I wanted was things encoded in surround sound to be represented as such, and things encoded in stereo to also be represented as such. I found it unbelievable how far we were as a hobby from knowing that simple information, and I figured I could use my big collection of weird retro consoles to help solve the problem.