GACO 2023 will count with speakers from different backgrounds and experiences, with a variety of talks that suit the world of Game and Interactive Audio.

SPEAKERS

Program

GACO 2025

Chance Thomas

Composer and Author

COPYRIGHTS, CASH, and CREATIVITY

HUGESound Records

Chance Thomas is a retired composer, author, and entrepreneur. During his career, Chance composed original music for some of the world’s most legendary entertainment properties, including The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, Avatar, Warhammer, Marvel, and many more. His music has underscored both commercial success and artistic honors, including an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, Game Audio Network Guild Awards, and billions of dollars in film and game sales worldwide. Learn more at: www.HUGEsoundRecords.com.

Successful business tips for today’s game audio professionals. How to exploit copyrights for the benefit of all parties, breaking free of the “starving artist” mentality, and exercising mighty creativity in your business, not just in your craft.

Eduardo Vaisman

Audio Director

Building Functional Audio Teams

Ubisoft Toronto

Eduardo Vaisman is an Argentine-Canadian Audio Director with over 30 years of experience in sound for both interactive and linear media. For the past 15 years, he has worked in AAA video games, collaborating with talented teams at Ubisoft Toronto to ship five major titles: Splinter Cell Blacklist - (Senior Sound Designer) Far Cry 4 - (Team Lead Audio) Far Cry Primal - (Team Lead Audio) Far Cry 5 - (Team Lead Audio) Far Cry 6 - (Audio Director)

Currently he is working in its 6th title as Audio Director of Splinter Cell Remake.

Before fully transitioning to game development, Eduardo spent 20 years in film, television, and digital media, earning credits on over 55 feature films in roles such as Sound Designer, Sound Editor, Mix Engineer, Picture Editor, VFX Editor, and Post-Production Coordinator.

Eduardo is also passionate about sharing knowledge and has spoken at leading industry events such as GDC, GameSoundCon, Tencent GDC, EVA, AES, and more. He has served as a guest lecturer at colleges and universities in three different countries.

He is always open to connecting, mentoring, and supporting fellow professionals and artists. Feel free to reach out.

Aligned with the FLEXIBLE theme, this talk explores best practices for building and scaling audio teams to suit projects of various sizes. Drawing from personal experience and conversations with developers and audio directors across indie, AA, and AAA game studios worldwide, I will discuss key roles and functions within audio teams, interdepartmental communication within larger dev teams, in-house vs. outsourced teams, workflows, and related real-world scenarios. This session is accessible to all developers and game audio professionals, whether you're part of a team, leading one, or aspiring to join a studio or work freelance. The format includes a 40–45 minute presentation followed by a Q&A session, supported by a PowerPoint deck.

Alistair Hirst

Senior Developer Relations Manager

A Sound Approach to Audio Pre-production

Dolby Laboratories

Alistair Hirst has extensive experience in the gaming industry, having shipped over 44 games across 11 platforms, from the Sega Genesis to the Nintendo Wii, PC, mobile, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. His expertise spans sound design, interactive music composition, audio integration and tools, and in-game audio system design.

As an Audio Director, he has built and managed many audio teams both in and out of house. He launched the Need for Speed franchise as Audio Director during his decade-long tenure at Electronic Arts, co-founded OMNI Audio, a game audio company that contributed to four campaigns of Guild Wars and Halo 2, among other projects. Before joining Dolby Laboratories, he served as Audio Director at Amazon Game Studios for six years.

Good audio pre-production will help you plan scope, budget, creative direction and an audio vision that meshes well with the game, no matter the size or genre of the game. This talk covers the various facets of pre-production, with some tips to improve the process.

Noknok Audio

Audio Outsourcing

The musical soundings of Tiny Glade

Team

A SUPERKUL duo of lil audio weirdos (Oda Tilset & Martin Kvale). We do all sorts of things in the game audio sphere, and focus on indie games with good vibes and cool stories we’re passionate about.

Oda Tilset and Martin Kvale delve into the audio for Tiny Glade, how they found the vibes, sounds, implementation and notes to fit the small charming diohrama game that blew up!

Helen Lynch

Music Designer

Coming soon

Cloud Imperium Games

bio coming soon

Coming soon

Composers' Panel

with Chance Thomas, Alyx Jones, Oda Tilset and Knut Avenstroup Haugen

The Various Composers' Journeys

Moderated by Theo Nogueira

Presented by NOPA

A panel between veteran composers that have worked on a variety of projects from big AAA titles to very successful Indies. This panel will cover the different aspects of being a composer in the industry and the different approaches on getting the jobs and making music that hits the heart of players.

Alyx Jones

Co-Founder & CEO / Composer & Sound Designer

The Road Less Travelled – From Music Degree, to Studio Founder

Silver Script Games

The Game Awards Future Class, MCV 30 Under 30 and BAFTA Breakthrough Alyx Jones has worked in dialogue and audio across titles from Elden Ring and Arcane, to more recent releases of Still Wakes the Deep and Atomfall.

In 2022 Alyx founded indie studio Silver Script Games, currently working on their debut game "The Quiet Things”, an autobiographical narrative game, created with the goal of opening conversations around taboo aspects of mental health, and experiences of abuse.

In 2015 I graduated with a degree in Creative Music Technology, and was very sure the only thing I wanted in life was to write music for games. Yet here I am 10 years later having had the privilege to work on games from Elden Ring to Still Wakes the Deep, and now as a company owner, working on my passion project every day. Everyone’s journey is unique, and while there are some established paths to various game audio jobs, there’s also a myriad of options you might never have considered outside of that!

Mathilde Hoffmann

Composer

ODDADA - (The challenges of) Crafting a musical playground

& Sound Designer

Mathilde is a composer and sound designer based in Hamburg, Germany. After working at Daedalic Entertainment on Ken Follett's: The Pillars of the Earth she chose ultimate flexibility ✨ by becoming a full time freelancer for indie games. You might know her work from Unrailed! 1 + 2, Closer the Distance and ODDADA.

ODDADA is a music game, in which you can create music by using and playing with odd machines and landscapes - creating bass lines, rhythms, melodies and combining them to a song. Through randomized levels and unlockable gadgets that you can arrange flexibly ✨, no playthrough of ODDADA will sound the same! Mathilde talks about the rollercoaster of the game's 4 years of development feat. over 7000 music samples, audio compression almost ruining the game's release, copyright strikes and more!

Sara Secora

Voice Over

Remote Accessibility in VO

Actress

Sara Secora is an award-nominated voice actor based in Detroit, Michigan, best known for her work in video games, animated films and TV series, and commercials. Her notable credits include Genshin Impact, The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, Fallout 76, Warframe, Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course, Dragon Ball: The Breakers, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, Smite, Once Human, Boonie Bears: Back to Earth, Rumble Garanndoll, Enchantimals: Royal Ocean Kingdom, and Bread Barbershop. More via her IMDB page.

Sara will cover the importance of remote recording for actors and its importance in accessibility. Throughout her career, Sara, who is a disable actor, has worked on various Indie and AAA games from her own home-studio, which is an example to why casting directors, game directors and audio directors should give more consideration to remote recording.

Funcom

Audio

Dune: Awakening - An Audio Discussion

Team

Funcom was founded in 1993. We were there in the early nineties, guns for hire making games for the big studios to fund our own crazy ideas. We were there in the early days of massively multiplayer online games, breaking new ground and pioneering features and business models that are commonplace today. More at Funcom.com

coming soon...

Joonas Turner

Sound Designer & Audio Engineer

How I approach Sound ->Design<

E-Studio

Joonas Turner is a Sound Designer, Music Composer, Audio Engineer, Game Designer from Finland who has worked on a lot of games throughout his career such as: Nuclear Throne, Badland series, Downwell, Broforce, Bleak Sword, Noita, ScourgeBringer, Atomicrops, Tormentor X Punisher, Go Mecha Ball, Bleed 2, Environmental Station Alpha, Cult of the Lamb, PAPERHEAD and more.

In this talk Sound Designer Joonas Turner will briefly go through his design thought process of some games he has worked on. Hopefully the talk will be informative for both, designers who are at the start of their journey to think in terms of design as well as more advanced designers to hear different approaches from a fellow designer.

Veterans' Roundtable

with Mathilde Hoffmann, Oliver Getz, Martin Kvale, Eduardo Vaisman and Joonas Turner

Game Audio in 2025 - What have we learned? Where are we going?

.

Presented by GAiN

This roundtable will discuss the game industry as a whole at this time and how it has affected game audio designers. It will cover the the experiences of veterans in different levels and sides of the industry and how they learned from the past and are navigating towards the future.