I know that sound!

I played that game 25 years ago, and I am still learning new stuff about it!

I never expected my experimenting with amateur radio in 2025 would teach me something about a computer game I first played 25 years earlier, in early 2000.

Set in the year 2051, that game felt really, really futuristic when playing it in the year 2000. It felt like diving into a wonderland, a scifi wonderland.

The game's story is so intense and laden with information that I noticed some new important details during each time I replayed the game. But 25 years later, I had expected to be aware of the most all of the things you can hear and see in it. But then I started to experiment with amateur radio...

Sidenote: The game, while set in the not-so-distant future, has a story that is not entirely dystopic. Indeed, I don't like stories that are entirely dystopic. While the game I'm talking about is quite grim and depressing at times, it has a positive protagonist and a happy ending, and a pretty logical one at that. You might go as far and call it the Star Trek of the 21st century, but that's just my personal opinion. The imagination of the people who created the game was vast, and many details were scientifically accurate. However, there still seems to exist analog communication in the game: You can hear some SSB modulation in it. At the times I played it, I couldn't identify that sound.

25 years later I started to play around with amateur radio and I started to use a software called quisk, in conjunction with a software defined radio called the Hermes Lite 2. I suddenly heard a sound and thought: I know that sound! Indeed, I had heard that sound before. But see for yourself.

In the game, you can hear this sound in many places, for example here:

Yes, there will still be SSB modulation in the year 2051! This is a 28s excerpt taken from the original game, quoted/published as fair use to illustrate the origin of that background sound that can be heard throughout various scenes in the game.

In case you're wondering, the 1st recording is really USB. That peak in the middle is not an AM unmodulated carrier frequency, but rather some QRM, probably some solar inverter. You can see another peak a bit to the left, at about 28.48MHz.

But anyway, 25 years after first playing the game, I finally know how they created or obtained that particular background sound sample. :-)

Oh, and: There is a scene in the game where you enter the lower parts of an "ocean lab", and the transmissions from the ground become more and more noisy. Good old AM radio. Well, when I first played that game, it should have been an obvious mistake. Especially since they were also transmitting images transmitted using that same interface, the "Infolink". But at that time, the static and noise felt so natural that I thought nothing of it. Of course, that's another mistake the authors of the game made. They simply did not expect AM/FM modulations to be replaced by something more digital, especially given that this Infolink is implanted directly into your brain...? :-)

But one question is still unanswered after all these years: Is there a way to turn it off?