The first-person shooter was born in silence. Before Sega’s Heavyweight Champ would spawn the fighting genre or an Arpanet contractor and outdoorsman would invent the text adventure, networked, multiplayer matches took place in the barren halls of Maze War, bounded by vectors, given form only in the imagination of those with access to a terrifically expensive PDS-1 computer. Updates eventually added spectator functionality, computer-controlled enemies, up to eight simultaneous players, and a level editor—essentially everything that would come to define the deathmatch. The year was 1973.
Few people today remember, let alone can claim to have played, Maze War. But you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of Pong, which came out the year prior, and despite its considerably less impressive graphics and features was among the first games to include sound. Its chirps and bloops—themselves the result of hardware limitations that did not permit the arcade cabinets to mimic a cheering (or booing) crowd, as the story goes—nonetheless lulled players into a trance. Many factors account for the grander legacy of Pong, not the least of which is that it was explicitly made for mass consumption rather than a limited number of eggheads working as government contractors. But hacked-together audio feedback certainly accounts for the game’s triumph over the Magnavox Odyssey’s Tennis, which it shamelessly copied. As for why Atari’s Allan Alcorn chose the specific tones he did, according to researcher Tom Langhorst: “They sounded about right.” What was then a marvel in player feedback Alcorn achieved in less than an hour by determining what the sync generator could already produce, with seemingly zero iteration. “That's the way it was left,” he told IGN in 2008, “so I love it when people talk about how wonderful and well-thought-out the sounds are.”
John Romero would eventually be credited for coining “deathmatch.” And he and his cofounders at Id Software are rightly canonized as instrumental in the formation of the modern FPS. But through an Alcornian combination of intuition and circumstance, Id is also the likely culprit behind a once-ubiquitous but largely invisible sonic sensibility of the genre: the hup.
The hup, as it’s sometimes known, is the onomatopoetic vocalization of effort given by the player-character when initiating a jump. While a gleeful bloop traces back to Donkey Kong (if not earlier), and Z-axis movement dates to the vehicular combat sims of the mid-’70s, a human character jumping in first-person perspective wouldn’t be achieved until 1992’s Ultima Underworld: the Stygian Abyss—released two months before BJ Blazkowicz would begin clearing bunkers full of Nazis with both feet firmly planted on the ground.
Other sounds were a far higher priority for shooters, like the blast of a shotgun or a groan when falling from a damaging height. Even purely environmental sounds with no mechanical value, like the sloshing of a bathtub in The Colony, predate the hup. And why not? Guns are loud. People in pain groan or shriek. Water gurgles. But most people do not sound like they’ve taken a punch to the liver when they become airborne. It’s not even immediately clear what the hup adds to the gameplay experience that the shifting screen perspective wouldn’t already convey. (More on that in a bit.)
The jump wouldn’t be meaningfully tied to the hup in the popular imagination until 1996’s Quake. And much like the 459-Hz tone of a returned volley in Pong, Quake’s iconic, meaty jump was not the product of conscious design.
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“We didn't spend that much time putting the sound into Quake,” Romero told me. “The thing that's important in game design is you put sounds in as early as you can because you will know if you hate it, and you don't want that to happen after the game ships.” He admitted that, in the 25 years since Quake was released, he’d never given the sound serious consideration and could not recall being asked about it in the likely thousands of interviews he’s given. (And Romero, who claims to possess hyperthymesia, has a legendary recall.) Still, he describes an almost autological approach to the sound-iteration process, saying, “We would have taken it out if it didn’t feel right. So it did feel right.”
Trent Reznor, who was tapped to provide the soundtrack for the game, also agreed to record some sound effects—much as Bobby Prince before him was responsible for both the music and effects of Doom. “Like a lot of things I get myself into, I'll say, 'yeah, I can do it' and then sort of figure out, ‘OK, how the fuck am I gonna actually do the sound effects’” he told me. Like Romero though, he remembers the sound effects as “kind of an afterthought” and his recording sessions in a corner of Nothing Studios in New Orleans as more playful goofing around with a DAT recorder than an attempt to achieve any specific sonic goal. “I remember just laughing, you know, because it was absurd to have a mic and have another guy sitting there just going ‘HUMPH, HURNK, HURP,’” he said. “Most of it, since we couldn't assign things ourselves, was based on the thousands of hours we spent playing Doom and Wolfenstein kind of instinctually, you know, knowing what might work and might not work.”
Romero likened the noise to the “wall humping” that was present in those earlier games, where players would press the Use key while moving along every surface in a map in the hope of discovering secret items or hidden levels. It’s possible the implied sound of a burly Nazi hunter pressing against an unopenable door became part of the Id shooter house style and was transposed from horizontal to vertical effort by Reznor. He also does not recall there ever being an alternate jump sound. “We never, like, made one and removed it,” Romero said. “It was just like yep, that's a good sound, put it in. Boom.”
While I don’t doubt Romero’s memory of Quake’s hup, then-colleague American McGee gave a slightly more nuanced explanation. And though uncredited for it, McGee was responsible for producing the game’s sound. In addition to tweaking whatever sounds came from Reznor’s camp, McGee also performed some Foley work of his own and plucked stock sounds from the same 40-CD library used for much of Doom. (A snippet of the famed Wilhelm Scream would become Quake’s sound for taking damage in lava.)
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“When Quake was being produced, we were in an era of the Army Of Darkness, Evil Dead type of horror. But it was also kind of gonzo, right? It was Sam Raimi making really over-the-top slasher, squishy, gushy horror films. And if you remember those movies, one of the things that was very much a signature about it were these moments of silence where, like, Ash would cock the shotgun, and the sound of the cocking of the shotgun was just blown up larger than life,” he said. That same sensibility or “making events in the world characters unto themselves” is likely what he believes resulted in the over-the-top jump sound of Id’s first fully 3D shooter.
Unlike in later games that would make their cultural touchstones more explicit—as in the They Live-paraphrasing Duke Nukem, or Blood’s Caleb quoting The Crow—Quake instead gestured toward the action hero caricature, letting the player fill in the gaps. “In Quake we didn't have dialog,” McGee said. “I mean, we barely had a story. But I think you could read from the grunt something of the personality, at least what personality you wanted to map onto that sort of empty vessel.” McGee also added that, as a result of Nine Inch Nails’ contract at the time, Reznor was barred from vocalizing in Quake—either in the soundtrack or the game’s effects. “I will say unofficially that I certainly know he recorded some noises. I know whether or not he's in the game,” he laughed, “but I won't say. But I will say that he wasn't supposed to be in the game.”
Beyond Romero’s assertion that “everything should make a sound” and McGee’s cinematic influences, the hup did have mechanical importance. “Playing Deathmatch in that office was where the greatest amount of iteration took place. That was like our petri dish,” McGee said. And while that petri dish wouldn’t manage to discover one of Quake’s most beloved mutations—the bunny-hop—Id’s experiments in turning their colleagues into virtual meat chunks did yield an important piece of intel, according to Romero: “Every single sound that you enable in the game is a giveaway.”
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As in Doom, sound became a tool that skilled players could use to locate an enemy or a feint to confuse opponents. The audible jump was another powerful arrow in that psychological quiver.
II
Pong may have been the first commercially successful game to include sound as player feedback, but it was following in the footsteps of another cabinet: 1971’s Computer Space, which, according to Karen Collins in her book Game Sound, included cues for explosions, rocket thrusters, and missiles. Quake’s hup has at least two direct genre precursors, though it’s unclear how much of a factor they were in the development process.
The first, unsurprisingly, is Dark Forces, a beloved LucasArts title from 1995 in which the player romps around the Star Wars extended universe as the blaster-wielding Kyle Katarn. (Incidentally, Dark Forces outsold Quake by a considerable margin, and Romero recalled seeing an early, not-entirely-functional build of the game at an industry convention in Chicago.) While low on the list of its many technical and aesthetic achievements, Dark Forces did include a sound cue for jumping, but nothing like the immediate and visceral hup that would soon dominate shooters. Instead, Katarn would exhale slightly near the top of his jump arc, a more grounded effect so subtle that programmer Winston Wolff had no recollection of it. “I don't recall that decision, if it even was a decision. It could have been us engineers adding sounds for actions, and that was an action and we just asked for another sound,” he wrote in an email. Other team members did not reply to requests for comment. The next LucasArts FPS—1997’s Outlaws—would drop the breathy “hhh” of Dark Forces in favor of an instantaneous and gritty “umph.”
Another ancestor might be the 3DO title PO’ed, which included the exact sort of grunt Quake would later popularize and launched seven months earlier, on Black Friday 1995, according to producer Brian Yen. And while Yen has claimed it also beat Quake to market as the first fully 3D shooter, that’s only sort of true: The environments were 3D; the enemies and other interactables were sprites. (PO’ed also likely invented the first-person-perspective missile weapon, an idea Unreal Tournament would perhaps unknowingly crib later with the Redeemer.) The hero of PO’ed could not only jump but backflip too, and the sounds cues, according to Yen, were inspired by Bruce Lee. While the player-character in PO’ed is a marooned, space-traveling chef rather than a martial artist, the movie inspirations and recording process are remarkably analogous to what was happening at Id. “Our ‘sound studio’ was in Brian's living room,” Nate Huand wrote. “We plugged a tiny microphone into the Mac (yes, THE Mac, we only could afford one back then!), and putting the mic on a small wooden chair surrounded by 5 sofa cushions, the poor man's soundproof chamber! I'm pretty sure I did the HUHH jump sound.” McGee seemed unaware of PO’ed, but Romero recalled the game as well as the year it was released, though he did not say if it influenced Quake in any way. The team, which built their own 3D engine from scratch for PO’ed, never worked on another game and mostly went on to lucrative technical positions at Apple, Nvidia, Facebook, and MIT.
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A hup is also audible in a title that, remarkably, may be even more obscure than PO’ed: 1996’s Deus, by French studio Silmarils. Deus, a successor to their earlier title Robinson’s Requiem—remembered mostly as a game that allowed you to amputate the player-character’s limbs—is a lumbering, punishingly difficult 3D survival simulator that, as PC Gamer’s Richard Cobbett wrote 15 years after its release, “isn't a good enough shooter to be worth forging through, nor does it have even close to enough story to make it a compelling RPG.” Deus’s hup is raspier than Quake’s, perhaps indicative of a character who can (and often does) die of an infection or slow blood loss. It’s inclusion here stems entirely from the total absence of reliable information on its release date, which theoretically could have been prior to June 22, when Quake was released; attempts to contact former Silmarils staff have been unsuccessful.
All of this is to say that while most games studios of the time prioritized every other aspect of game development before sound, some were making headway on what would become the hup. Crucially though, all were single-player experiences, and most were, and are, unknown to the majority of the game-buying public. Without deathmatch, these were purely aesthetic choices that served to increase immersion or hint at the developers’ cultural touchstones, though soon the hup would simply become the de facto sound of deathmatch.
Romero, McGee, and Reznor all denied being aware that Quake’s jump noise had influenced audio feedback in other shooters. But many developers, then as now, were consciously riffing the hup. Even the jump sound in the first Serious Sam game, which began development around the same time as Quake but would not be released until 2001, “was an homage to the games that we played at times … Unreal, Quake II, Unreal Tournament,” CroTeam’s composer Damjan Mravunac told me over email. “From our point of view, all top FPS’s had [a] grunt when jumping, so we couldn't let Serious Sam out without one.”
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And for a span of about five years, that seems to have been the case for a good many developers. Turok (1997), Chasm: the Rift (1997), Quake II (1997), Hexen 2 (1997), the aforementioned Outlaws (1997), Unreal (1998), SiN (1998), Battlezone (1998), Unreal Tournament (1999), Kingpin (1999), Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (1999), Battlezone 2: Combat Commander (1999), and Deus Ex (2000), to name a few, all included variations on Quake’s obvious, grunty jump effect. Not coincidentally, all included multiplayer deathmatch modes.
The de rigueur hup appeared in less fondly remembered titles too, like PowerSlave (1996), An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire (1997), Blood II: The Chosen (1998), Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998)—which forced the player to ogle their avatar’s cleavage to know how much health they still had—Requiem: Avenging Angel (1999), The Wheel of Time (1999), the game adaptation of the comic book adaptation of the band Kiss: Psycho Circus (2000), Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (2000), and of course John Romero’s post-Id flop Daikatana (2000).
There were exceptions. Many budget titles, like Alien Breed 3D or Forbes Corporate Warrior, were still being built in dated, Doom-like engines that didn’t allow for jumping at all. Some were single-player-only affairs that had a jump but no sound cue—Realms of the Haunting for instance. Others supported multiplayer but opted against Id’s brash house style for one reason or another: Build Engine favorites like Shadow Warrior and Redneck Rampage; the sequel to Dark Forces, which dropped the breathy jump vocalization entirely in favor of environmental Foley like cloth fluttering and boots tapping on various flooring materials; and System Shock 2, which retained the silent jump action from its predecessor but tacked on a deathmatch function. Build Engine gem Blood, which allowed for deathmatching, would take what was likely the most prescient approach of including a jump vocalization, but one so faint as not to distract from the game’s horror-inspired atmosphere. “We specifically focused on ricochet and foot movement sounds that matched the environment,” designer Nick Newhard told me over email.
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Probably the most enduring hupless multiplayer shooters of the time, though, were early console titles like Goldeneye, Timesplitters, and eventually Halo: Combat Evolved. None supported online play, and so deathmatches would take place on opposite sides of the same television screen, rendering these sorts of localization cues impossible. Whatever utility was contained in the hup was becoming an open question.
III
As McGee sees it, a jump sound was the nearly inevitable result of an industry that was maturing. Where sound design was once one of several hats a game developer would have to wear, a number of interconnected factors was leading toward larger teams with higher levels of specialization. At the same time, hardware was becoming more powerful, and consumers were getting faster, more reliable access to the internet. Teams like Id were just beginning to have the mental bandwidth to consider sound’s impact on deathmatch, but as the machines these games were being designed and played on became more capable, the deathmatch itself evolved.
More power meant the ability to render dramatically larger maps, where even the most over-the-top player noise would be of little tactical value, and a normal jump would be inadequate for traversal. The multiplayer-only Starsiege: Tribes would be a harbinger of this kind of design philosophy—providing its players a (relatively quiet) jetpack to zip around its sprawling locations. It was an elegant solution that would be echoed in the growing trend toward including usable vehicles, which functioned as both transportation and super-weapon.
Hardware improvements also allowed games to move out of abstract level design and toward realism. The late ’90s and early 2000s would give rise to the military-simulation and tactical-shooter genres, some of which—like Ghost Recon and SWAT 3—would remove jumping entirely in pure service to actual military protocol. While deathmatch avatars might be able to bounce around while holding 20 weapons and body armor, an actual soldier would likely break their legs if they attempted something similar. Similar games, like the first two Rainbow Six entries, would retain the jump as a vestigial feature even though it had no obvious use case in the missions it assigned to players.
Likely the real nail in the hup’s coffin, though, was a shift in multiplayer games away from deathmatch’s complete free-for-all, starting with team-based play, then the ability to select specialized classes. Whatever information was once contained by a stray jump sound could now be conveyed with greater specificity by a teammate through commands and later via voice chat programs like Teamspeak or Ventrillo, both of which launched in 2002. While Quake may have tried to make sounds into “characters unto themselves,” those characters became a distraction in maps that were now supporting dozens of actual player-characters, all of which needed to be heard.
And so, for a while anyway, the hup fell out of style, even being omitted from games where one might expect it to crop up. It was absent from the throwback-y Gore: Ultimate Soldier (2002) as well as Doom 3 (2004), both of which contained fairly “classic” deathmatch modes. And while the Unreal series held on to tradition for longer than most, even as it added vehicles and other modern features, the hup was finally dropped in Unreal Tournament 3 (2007). Perhaps nothing exemplifies the changing gameplay and stylistic motifs than Team Fortress, an early class-based team shooter. Born as a Quake mod, Valve—a studio which almost uniformly eschews the hup—ported the game into its GoldSrc engine, leaving the jump vocalization intact. But when it came time to release its sequel in 2007, its jumps had become nearly silent.
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Even games that swam against the current of tactical mil-sims had moved beyond the cartoony hup. “I was never a fan of the super-slow methodical pacing of tactical shooters such as Rainbow 6, and I felt that the ultra-fast movement of Unreal Tournament-slash-Quake was a bit too over the top, so I made the decision to just find a middle ground between the two genres,” Counter-Strike creator Minh Lee told me. “Oddly enough, the sound of players jumping never really crossed my mind at the time.” Lee created one mod prior to Counter-Strike called Navy SEALs, which was built with Quake’s software development kit and retained its jump sound; Counter-Strike, however, was built as a mod to Valve’s considerably less-macho Half-Life (though it bears mentioning that Half-Life was itself built an a heavily modified version of Quake’s engine). True to that down-the-middle approach, Lee created a game which exhibits some of the speed and bouncy, fantastical movement of an arena FPS, paired with the class-based characters and realistic weaponry of a tactical shooter. “Perhaps it is something that could have added an interesting meta to the game and made players more cautious of abusing the jump mechanic,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, once CS's player base grew to such a massive size, it was difficult changing the meta of the game, and eventually the core game mechanics became set in stone.”
The blunt tool of jump vocalizations was replaced by more advanced means of facilitating player awareness. As a result, many of the most popular modern multiplayer shooters, like Apex Legends, Fortnight, Battlefield V, Left 4 Dead, PUBG, Tarkov, and Valorant, exhibit silent or nearly silent jumps.
IV
It’s been 25 years since the release of Quake, and in the intervening years, the hup has become something of an audiovisual libfix. In the way almost no one referring to a scandal as [noun]-gate means to evoke the downfall of Richard Nixon specifically, the hup persists but largely as an aesthetic rather than functional piece of gameplay.
Big-budget hero shooters like Overwatch include one, albeit buried under layers of additional Foley and only triggering on about 50 percent of jumps. “It's not a major gameplay cue for us, but like they a do little *huh! huh!–*type thing,” Scott Lawler, the game’s audio director, told me. “In jumping in first person, I think there's 11 materials we support, there's 11 different jump sounds for all different types of materials, there's 11 different jump land sounds, there's a fall loop—if you fall off the ledge it goes whooooooosh,—it's got a fall land, which is a big land on the ground after jumping for some height.” And all of this is not only duplicated for third-person view and passed through a variety of reverbs to simulate the environment, but it’s fed into the game’s “importance system,” ranks and appropriately boosts or attenuates those sounds in order to achieve what he calls “the impossible goal of turning the screen off and knowing what's going on in the game.” Of these, the characters’ Street Fighter-influenced ultimate attacks as well as team chat massively outrank the rustling and faint grunt of the jump. And while the patch notes don’t reflect it, iterations of the game’s audio have received various remixes and balances. While the hup may have been greatly nerfed, the arena shooter’s influence peeks through in places. “The jump pads in Overwatch were definitely very inspired by Quake and those games,” Lawler said. “And even the sound was something the design was really particular about that being map-wide. So if you play Oasis and someone takes a jump pad, you could be halfway across the map, and you can tell.”
But recent years have also led to an influx of retro-styled shooters specifically meant to harken back to the sensibilities of the mid- to late ’90s, often made by small teams or individual creators. “In Dusk, hup was an intentional callback to Quake,” developer Dave Szymanski told me over Discord. In his estimation, the hup creates the sense of “immediacy” present in games with “combat focused around skillful movement and speed” and “level design that was interesting as a 3D space rather than just a series of decorated hallways or arenas [that take] the player on an interesting journey.” In his answer you can read a certain disappointment that shooters have gone from being inspired by film to trying to become films unto themselves.
The developers of Prodeus, who also included the hup as a nostalgic nod to a “semi-comical time period” in gaming, seemed similarly disillusioned with the state of modern shooters. “Games evolved and required different needs, things got too ‘serious,’” Jason Mojica and Mike Voeller wrote in an email, “but at the same time, I couldn't imagine Counter-Strike if your character made a jumping noise each time you tried to get through a window.”
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Dusk includes Duskworld, its multiplayer deathmatch appendage—though its servers are not heavily populated; Mojica and Voeller have deathmatch on their features roadmap. But among retro shooters, that makes them more of an outlier than the norm. HROT, Cruelty Squad, Viscerafest, Hellbound, Graven, Amid Evil, Dread Templar, Sprawl, Selaco, Nightmare Reaper, and Hedon, all exhibit the same gleeful nostalgia for a chunkier, more abstract breed of shooter, and each brings its own timbre of hup along for the ride. Vomitoreum supplants the human hup with a loud robotic hiss similar to 1997’s S.C.A.R.A.B., while Wrath: Aeon of Ruin’s developers showed their reverence for the era by not only including a version of the iconic grunt but by building the game in a version of Quake’s now largely obsolete engine. None include a deathmatch mode—the entire reason Quake likely included this now-nostalgic sound cue at all.
Even with much faster hardware and powerful game-building tools like Unity at their disposal, the enormous technical challenge of building out and maintaining multiplayer, often with teams considerably smaller than Id’s was in 1996, might make deathmatch a difficult proposition. But for Noah Dickinson, Viscerafest’s developer—who incidentally was not yet born when Quake hit shelves—the calculus was even simpler. “I don't like multiplayer. As a consumer it’s a throwaway addition to every game I play that I almost never touch,” he tweeted last month. “As a creator I have no interest in building that kind of an experience.” Still, the classic jump sound, which he also admits is a reference to Quake, made it into his game. “That hup implies energy is being exerted, your character is actively forcing themselves away from the ground, and it does a lot to reaffirm the player's inputs,” he told me over Discord. It and other Foley elements “are meant to make what you are doing as a player feel like more than it actually is,” he said.
V
Maybe deathmatching never really needed the hup to begin with. Sound localization undoubtedly played a role in Quake’s competitive scene, especially at the highest level. Dennis Fong, known in-game as “Thresh,” was among the very first professional gamers. Roughly a year after winning one of John Carmack’s personal Ferraris in a tournament, he published a guide—Thresh’s Quake Bible—that devotes two pages to the game’s sounds. Still, the guide gives far greater consideration to the sounds made when various resources are picked up by an opponent, like weapons, armor, or health. The only mention of specifically manipulating the jump (other than rocket-jumping) comes in a subsection about levels containing water. Fong notes that “if you use jump to move up when in water, it'll make a small bubbling noise. If you use swim up, it won't make any noise at all.” He adds that holding down the jump key when entering water dramatically reduces the splash sound. The hup seemingly wasn’t especially meaningful in the top-level meta-game of Quake at the peak of competitive deathmatching.
Pessimistically, it might seem like the rock-star developers of the time threw a sound into their splashy new game because they could and didn’t find it annoying enough to remove. Then every game that followed in those footsteps re-created that sound, perhaps without even consciously considering why it was being included. That might be one way to read it. Much more consequential things in human history amounted to accidents and inertia.
Even so, that inertia clearly ran out at some point, and if we’re to believe the resurgence of this strange and possibly useless feature is pure nostalgia, the question is: nostalgia for what? There are as many answers to that as there are potential sources of strife with the modern AAA shooter.
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