By John Gaudiosi

New processors and advanced graphics are always a hit at the Game Developers Conference, but digital audio companies like Cakewalk, Dolby, and DTS also have a presence. With new PC games starting to take advantage of Dolby 7.1 surround sound  -- and DTS’ unveiling of 11.1 surround sound with DTS Neo:X  technology at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 -- sound is playing a more important role in today’s video game landscape.

“We have seen the evolution of game audio go from sounds that accompany video to fully immersive musical scores that envelope the user in the action or world,” says Steve Thomas, public relations director of Cakewalk, which has Sonar X1 audio software available for game developers. “And when it comes to cut scenes, where the expectation for video and audio quality is very high, it’s like producing for TV/film. No more cheesy sound FX and simulated strings -- now you get high-quality sampling and real orchestras. Game on!”

By John Gaudiosi

“Technology plays a huge role for the modern soldier, first and foremost in regards to communication,” says Stuart White, senior producer on Ghost Recon: Future Soldier , due to be released this year. “Ask any soldier what would happen if they found themselves in the field with no communication to base or their squadmates. Coordination of movement allows a small squad of soldiers to become a devastating unit on the modern battlefield. This coordination happens because of technology.

Of course, when it comes to video games, communication technology doesn’t play as large of a role as the fun factor of weapons and gadgets. To combine a true military feel with a great game, the Future Soldier development team in Paris had to blend real-world tactics with near-future technology, and then factor in fun and engaging gameplay to deliver the experience Ghost Recon fans expect.

Rally driving is dominated by one thing: four tires. Every spectacular corner, power slide, or windshield-cracking collision is determined by the complex interactions between those spinning pieces of tread and the unpredictability of an unmade road surface. Small wonder that even after 10 years of the multi-million-selling Colin McRae Rally  games -- or DiRT, as the games are known in North America -- U.K. developer and publisher Codemasters  still maintains a laser-like focus on simulating that pedal-to-the-metal, rubber-on-the-gravel reality.

Need for Speed World, built by Electronic Arts (EA) Black Box in Burnaby, British Columbia, started a little more than two years ago with a simple idea: become the first real racing MMO. Knowing that racing gamers don’t need to understand the ins and outs of how a car works in order to enjoy zipping along online city streets or race circuits, EA sought to bring this racing MMO to the masses.

I recently caught up with two of the key visionaries behind Need for Speed World. Dave Wall, a 15-year veteran of the gaming industry, is the rendering and systems lead on the Need for Speed franchise. Eneko Bilbao, Black Box’s technical director, has worked on Need for Speed for two years. Together, Wall and Bilbao provide a convincing case for using Agile development, in-game analytics and performance-analyzing tools for creating a rolling-thunder rollout of new game features and optimized game performance.

Ghostbusters was an unusually long project for us. We started in January 2006 with a prototype. For the first nine months of development, we were working on recreating the ballroom scene where Slim is captured from the first movie, obtaining the movie license and getting the green light to develop the project. At the same time, we knew we had something special with the Infernal Engine. A few former Terminal Reality employees wanted to use our technology to create a game for themselves; hence our engine licensing effort began as well.

Generations of children have grown up playing with the Danish LEGO toy bricks. Over the past decade, while those original toys still flourish, kids and kids-at-heart have transitioned to LEGO videogames from developer Traveller’s Tales(TT Games) and the LEGO Company. Just as the LEGO Star Wars toys remain bestsellers over a decade after they were introduced, the LEGO Star Wars video games established developer TT Games as a force to be reckoned with and opened up the floodgates for other licensed games like LEGO Batman, LEGO Indiana Jones, and LEGO Harry Potter. Now, the developer behind all of these blockbuster hits has returned with LEGO Star Wars: The Clone Wars, featuring a brand-new game engine that brings the latest technology to PC gamers.

It’s been 30 years since writer/director Steven Lisberger first started working on bringing his vision of TRON  to the big screen. The film ushered in a new generation of computer animation, which allowed audiences to be transported into cyberspace and experience video game battles within the mainframe. TRON was the first movie to have a hit video game tie-in at the arcade, which seamlessly connected the film universe with the real world’s burgeoning video game industry.

One of the people who were both influenced by TRON and active in cyberspace was architect-turned-commercial director Joe Kosinski, who ended up working with Lisberger to bring TRON: Legacy to the big screen. Now Walt Disney Pictures  is bringing TRON: Legacy to the big screen, using the latest computer graphics technology to introduce a new wave of video game battles on the Grid. And Disney Interactive Studios  has enlisted Propaganda Games  to develop the TRON: Evolution game, which tells the story of what’s been going on within the TRON mythology over the past three decades.

As head of Electronic Arts’ The Sims division -- the best-selling PC franchise of all time -- Executive Vice President Rod Humble of Electronic Arts has reached the pinnacle of gaming success. He gets to call the shots on some of the highest-profile, biggest-revenue projects in the industry.

You would think he’d want to do anything but design more games at the end of his long, intense days. Think again. Humble blows off steam by cooking up home-brewed games intended to be a form of combination art. His indie efforts -- available on his personal site, Rodvik.com -- include an oddly boxy interaction game called The Marriage, a constellation creator called Stars Over Half Moon Bay, a look at the final days of an extinct species of cattle called Last Thoughts of the Aurochs, and the soon-to-be-released Perfect Distance, which follows a former artillery officer through life.