You’d be surprised. He happens to be local to me, and I was actually able to meet and chat with him once (and if this news is true, only weeks before he left the team).
He was in fact the sole reason we got the car sounds modernized in GT Sport and on, redoing everything from scratch with his process. He could be extremely mobile with his setup, load up everything he needed in the trunk of a BMW, set up in a convenient dyno shop, and send recorded audio files to the team in Japan for mixing and programing in a matter of hours.
And while you’re right, there is an audio team back at base, Mike was the man on the ground sourcing and recording just about everything, at least in the US and maybe Europe. He told me previously PD didn’t “actually” have an in house audio team, Sony/Playstion had an internal audio team that was hired out to do work for all their various studios including stuff outside gaming, and they were the ones tasked with capturing the sounds prior to Mike’s arrival. He even talked about having to deal with a lot of corporate politics to get the team to shift to his methodology.
In fact this interaction with him is how I found out about the Porsche 918 being such a problem for them to record.
If this is in fact a parting of ways between the two, that’s a huge bummer for me. I was hoping within the next year or so I would’ve been able to position myself to use this connection to make an active contribution to the Gran Turismo series, and that may not be possible now.
