You're Under Attack, Sire Helm’s Deep with Stronghold sound effects
There’s a very specific circuit in my brain that fires for maybe four other people I’ve ever met in person, and a YouTuber called Bacxaber just ran 42 volts straight through it.
The find: the entire Battle of Helm’s Deep – rain-soaked, doomed, scored to within an inch of its life by Howard Shore – re-dubbed with the sound effects from Stronghold Crusader. Firefly Studios, 2002, the desert castle sim where your peasants grumble like they’re personally disappointed in your reign and a supernaturally calm herald lets you know you’re under attack, sire roughly every eleven seconds.
Helm’s Deep with Stronghold sound effects
And it is note-perfect. Gimli doesn’t get a war cry – he gets the pig. The actual Stronghold pig, grunting and snorting through the entire last stand, because a pig sort of looks like a maceman if you squint. Aragorn, now inexplicably Geordie, tells his archers to take steady aim in the flat tone of a man reading a shopping list, at orcs standing maybe thirty feet away. The Uruk-hai kamikaze who sprints a torch into the culvert to blow the wall? He chirps Freedom! – the noise a Crusader slave makes the moment you disband him – like he’s delighted about it. And Théoden, king of Rohan, spends the darkest night of his life demoted to a Stronghold status announcer: your popularity is falling, where’s your castle? It should not work, yet I wheezed.
What I keep turning over: There are two jokes stacked on top of each other. The top one is free – anyone can laugh at a serene British voice narrating a massacre and a, well, farm animal standing in for Gimli, and one guy in the vid’s comments cheerfully admits he had no idea what Stronghold even was and watched the thing twice anyway. But the joke underneath, the one that actually took the top of my head off, only goes off if you’ve logged the hours. You have to know in your bones that Freedom! is the disband-a-slave line. You have to have heard your popularity is falling a thousand times while your own little medieval economy quietly imploded around you. That layer isn’t for an audience – it’s for a congregation.
Which is the thing I’ve been trying to put a name to for a while now: this is the millennial answer to boomer humor, somehow. Same skeleton – generational, in-group, deeply you-had-to-be-there – just with the cringe boiled off and some actual craft left in the pan. Your uncle forwards a minivan meme in Comic Sans. We send each other a five-minute clip where the emotional peak of a billion-dollar film trilogy gets deflated by a farmyard grunt from a 2002 strategy game, and we send it as a love letter. The reference point moved from the lawn to the CD-ROM; the instinct behind it is exactly the same.
And I’ve been here before – we all have, as it turns out. This is a whole little genre. Years ago I posted Troy dubbed with Age of Empires sounds and cried the exact same tears; other editors have given the Braveheart and Kingdom of Heaven battles the same Stronghold treatment. Big self-serious historical carnage, punctured by cheap RTS barks – apparently a lot of us were issued precisely one sense of humor. There’s even a loop that makes Bacxaber’s version cut deeper: Helm’s Deep is one of the most-rebuilt custom maps in Stronghold’s entire modding history, waterfalls and sally ports and all. People have been reconstructing the Hornburg in that castle editor for twenty years. The sounds were basically already home.
Credit where it’s owed: Bacxaber – whose channel is otherwise a cheerfully not-kid-friendly diet of TF2 and Sea of Thieves – says the edit was a nightmare, the .wav files corrupting on import for no reason anyone could pin down, rescued only by a friend converting the whole lot to mp3. Suffering for the craft. The craft being: give Gimli the voice of the pig.
Anyway. You’re under attack, sire. Go watch it!
