“I wanted you to feel bad”: former Battlefield audio designer recalls punching himself to record more realistic gunshot screams
Bence Pajor, audio director for Arc Raiders and formerly of DICE, has shared details about his unconventional methods for creating sound effects during his time working on the Battlefield franchise. Speaking on the Game Makers Notebook podcast, Pajor—a former Swedish military sniper—recalled experimenting with extreme techniques to capture realistic audio for soldiers being hit by gunfire.
Among his methods, Pajor punched himself hard enough to elicit genuine cries of pain, which he then recorded and attempted to use as source material for gunshot sound effects. The approach was driven by a desire to achieve authenticity and emotional impact in the game’s audio design. However, the recordings proved too disturbing for his colleagues; when a fellow designer encountered them, they requested the audio be removed from the project.
It remains unclear whether any of Pajor’s self-inflicted pain recordings ultimately made their way into released Battlefield titles. The anecdote highlights both the creative extremes some developers pursue in pursuit of realism and the practical limits colleagues may place on such methods. Pajor’s background as a military sniper likely informed his perspective on authenticity, though his self-harm approach to sound design appears to have been viewed as excessive even within a professional game development studio.