"Initially we were given about 10 hours' worth of sound effects," Minto says. "A lot of these were the original recordings. They have what’s called the ‘slate’ at the beginning, where somebody talks into a microphone and says, ‘Doing Jawa recordings by shouting in a canyon,’ or something along those lines." Those recordings, along with the broken-down sound effects track from the movies themselves, gave Minto and his team the raw ingredients to start with. But movies and games are obviously very different mediums, and a sound effects sequence tailored to a specific action scene in a film isn’t going to have everything a first-person shooter will need.

"Say, for example, the blasters. In the film pretty much every blaster you hear is third person," Minto explains. While that can serve as a definitive example of what the weapon should sound like, the various conditions of the game require permutation upon permutation — what the blaster will sound like up close, far away, or 100 yards off to the right inside a hanger on Hoth. "We already have that learning from taking a gun and putting it into the Battlefield world. So then we also knew what techniques we had to apply to take a blaster and put it into the Battlefront world."

"I spent a couple of days recording wire fences in Iceland."

Balanced with that was the fact that Battlefront has a much wider array of space-age weaponry compared to the original films. "There’s maybe about four different blaster sounds in the movies," Jegutidse says, "but we have 12 or something infantry blasters, plus additional abilities. So it’s important that we build those new blasters from elements that are familiar to the Star Wars soundscape and make it seem seamless when next to a familiar blaster."

That meant going back to the same techniques Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt used to create some of the sound effects in 1977. "We started off with the slinky spring, which is probably the common one, where you just throw that up and stick it to the roof, and twang it," Minto says. "I spent a couple of days recording wire fences in Iceland. And I also went to the largest free-standing antenna in Western Europe, which is about 1.5 kilometers high, because that had the longest guide wires, which is the way Ben Burtt originally did the blasters. I sort of snuck up and tried to twang it, and it didn’t make any sound at all. So that was an 8-hour round trip to get nothing," he laughs.

Jegutidse also incorporated things like mechanical movements, ice pings recorded underwater, and metal slides to create the many blasters of Battlefront. "Just using organic sources, not really synthetic; nothing digital," he says. "That’s usually avoided, because that’s not part of how these sounds were originally created."

As the pair talk, it’s clear they have a real reverence for the work Burtt and the original Star Wars audio team came up with — Minto goes so far as to call Star Wars the audio "holy grail," saying it’s one of the reasons the modern concept of a sound designer exists in the first place. But their insistence on mimicking the techniques used in a film that was made 38 years ago isn’t just fan service; it’s actually the best way to create things that actually sound like they’re part of that world.