The Hup: the Origins of the Jump Grunt Explained
Seems like the sound comes from 1996's Quake.
Do you grunt when you jump? Does the character in your favorite game? Among the multitude of game sounds, what role does the 'jumping grunt' play?
The hup, the sound of a character jumping, might not be that apparent, but it exists, albeit not in all modern games. Wired tried to find out where it came from and why it was created.
According to the article, the hup was first meaningfully tied to a jump in 1996’s Quake. Id Software's co-founder and Quake's developer John Romero admitted that the hup was not made to achieve some kind of goal. What's more, its meaning seems to have eluded everybody on the team.
"We didn't spend that much time putting the sound into Quake,” Romero told Wired. “The thing that's important in game design is you put sounds in as early as you can because you will know if you hate it, and you don't want that to happen after the game ships."
Trent Reznor, who recorded the sound effects for the game, also said the sounds were based on the previous gaming experience:
"I remember just laughing, you know, because it was absurd to have a mic and have another guy sitting there just going ‘HUMPH, HURNK, HURP,’” he said. “Most of it, since we couldn't assign things ourselves, was based on the thousands of hours we spent playing Doom and Wolfenstein kind of instinctually, you know, knowing what might work and might not work."
However, the hup seems to have mechanical importance: according to Romero, in Deathmatch, "every single sound that you enable in the game is a giveaway." So the sound of a character jumping points at the enemy's location. While not that crucial, it was used in multiple games after Quake and Doom: Turok, Chasm: the Rift, Quake II, Hexen 2, Outlaws, Unreal, SiN, Battlezone, Unreal Tournament, Kingpin, and Deus Ex (2000), and others.
After some time, the hup was rendered quite useless, with the rise of single-player and team-based games. Nowadays, the hup exists mostly as an aesthetic feature in some modern games. For example, Overwatch has it but not as "a major gameplay cue."
Overall, the jumping grunt doesn't feel like an important part of gameplay, even in the past, when developers just started adding sound to games. But maybe it does add something to the game, even if it's just the feeling of nostalgia these days.
What do you think about the hup? Does it have a function? Share your thoughts and don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
