The sound of this one specific bird from Age of Empires keeps haunting me through pop songs, movies, and across other games
It's not uncommon for videogame sound effects to be sourced from sound effect libraries, which is why you sometimes hear the same ones show up in movies and TV shows. I've heard the whooshy Doom door sound effect in Doctor Who, Event Horizon, Galaxy Quest, and plenty of other places. But there is one specific bird sound, a tremolo warble that I know from Age of Empires, which I seem to hear more than anything else.
Mostly it's in pop songs. It plays repeatedly over the outro of Anaconda by Nicki Minaj, and you can hear it in Babylon by Lady Gaga. It's in Pacific State by 808 State and Animals Beat by Skrillex. It's in multiple tracks by Aphex Twin. I think it's in Michael Jackson's Thriller, but that might be a different sample of the same call, and I'm halfway convinced it's been used in heavily processed form in Lana Del Rey's Million Dollar Man. According to Who Sampled, it's in at least 190(!) tracks. Basically, anywhere someone wants things to sound a bit wild and maybe like you're in the jungle, this is the go-to bird cry.
Which is why it's so funny that it actually comes from a Canadian bird called the common loon. That eerie cry belongs to a bird so ungainly that, depending on wind conditions, it can need up to a quarter-mile run up before it takes flight.
I first noticed this sample being used outside Age of Empires when I heard it in Hold the Line by Major Lazer. In my former life as a music journalist I interviewed Switch, a producer who was at that point half of Major Lazer, and asked him if he got it and the other animal sounds he used from the classic realtime strategy game.
"They actually are from a CD that I got in Japan with a lot of computer game sounds," he said, "so it could well be from that particular game. I don't know, I've never played that game before. It fitted in with the whole concept of the album where it's kind of fun and cartoony and stuff like that."
That CD was probably one of the Audiosparx or Sound Ideas library discs, though before that the track Common Loon, Single Call was part of the Emulator II Sound Library volume 22: Wind Chimes, Birds and Streams as "Loon Garden". According to a deep dive published by Pitchfork it was recorded by the late Richard Burmer, a composer and sound designer who worked for E-mu Systems, and it was one of the presets on the E-mu Emulator II, a synthesizer that was used by the Pet Shop Boys when they recorded West End Girls and Peter Gabriel in Sledgehammer.
It was also the synth played by John Carpenter when he was scoring various movies throughout the 1980s, and Matthew Broderick when playing vomit sounds in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Movies tend to prefer a different loon call, the longer wail that is used to signify things are a bit spooky that's been used in Platoon, Avengers: Infinity War, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and so many other movies it has its own TV Tropes page as well as a Vox video investigation into why Hollywood keeps using it.
Videogames aren't as hooked on loon sonics as movies and music are, though once you know what you're listening for, the specific Age of Empires loon sample is in Valve games like Counter-Strike, as well as several of the Lego games, Majora's Mask, Banjo-Kazooie, and Two Worlds. Different samples of loon calls show up in plenty of other games too.
Now I've cursed you with this knowledge, like me you'll be haunted by it. You'll hear a loon in The Long Dark and think, that's not right, the lake's frozen over. How could a loon take off on that? You'll hear a loon in Halo Infinite and think it's weird a bird more typically found around the Great Lakes region is on an alien planet. Most disturbingly of all, you'll hear the sound Dark Souls' mushroom children make when they die and realize, yep, that's definitely just another common loon. They're everywhere.