How Sledgehammer Games re-created the sounds of war for Call of Duty: WWII

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
April 27, 2017
Updated June 20, 2025
12 min

It isn’t easy re-creating the sounds of a distant war, but that’s what Sledgehammer Games had to do for Call of Duty: WWII, the new installment of the Call of Duty series that will debut this fall.

Sledgehammer has been working on the game for the past 2.5 years, and I saw a preview of it at Sledgehammer’s headquarters in Foster City, Calif. After I saw a trailer and a level of the new game, I sat down with was David Swenson, audio director for Sledgehammer. Swenson had access to a lot of World War II era guns and even some working World War II vehicles.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.