Old Audio Part 3: Amiga, career-maker

Part 2 of this series can be found here.

How to get into the game industry?

tl;dr Make stuff. Meet people.

Well that's a pretty open-ended question This is how I got into the game industry, your mileage may vary, but this should hopefully contain some useful inspiration.

I was heavily into my Commodore 64. Playing games on it was what I mostly used to do when I wasn't at school. I tried programming a few things on it in BASIC, but it just didn't really click for me. I remember the manual having some sound programming examples. It was all going well until it I wanted to modify one of the programs to play a chord instead of a single note. I expected a way to setup the three channels and then do a single command to play all three at once, but the only way to do it seemed to be to play one channel, then the next, then the next. My undeveloped brain couldn't comprehend that even though the program would play them sequentially, the computer ran so fast (less than 1Mhz!) that all three notes would effectively began at exactly the same time.

A life-changing invention

When the Amiga 500 became available, it was the clear upgrade path from the C64. I sold all of my C64 gear (games, magazines, printer, disk drive and all that) and gave the money to my parents so that they could add to it to get me an Amiga for Christmas. When it arrived, I spent all of my free time on it, again mostly playing games, and latched onto anyone I knew who also had one (which wasn't many people at that time and this was many years before the internet was available to the public). I heard about a computer club nearby and started going there every week. It was the geekiest thing you could possibly imagine. It was held at St. Laurence's Parish Centre in Birkenhead and although it tried to be a general computer club, it was mostly a copy-as-many-games-as-you-can club. X-Copy could be seen running on most of Amiga screens every week. The organizers tried to stop the copying a few times, but never could.

Why copy it? Because it's there

A box I've never seen in real life

One week, I copied whatever new stuff I could as usual and the next day went through the disks to see what they were like. I booted one of them up and didn't have a clue what I was looking at. It was The Ultimate Soundtracker by Karsten Obarski. After much clicking on stuff and messing with it, I somehow managed to load a demo song and realised that it was a music program. "Oh. Interesting", thought I. It was quite an achievement to do that because it had no file dialog; you had to know the filename of the song you wanted to load into it and being a dodgy copy, there were no instructions. The original soundtracker never had mod files (a mod file is a soundtracker file with the music data and samples all in a single file). Everything was split into songs and instruments so that after the song data had loaded it asked you to put in whichever disk each of its samples referenced. The program came with one disk of instruments, labelled ST-01. This set of samples, sampled from various keyboards of the era, became very well known in Amiga circles.

The way it operated made sense to me immediately. I messed around with it a bit and from then on, I was sold. I would come home from school, go straight upstairs, put on my Amiga and load Soundtracker, and write music. Every day. They started out pretty badly of course. I don't have to try and remember how badly because I somehow still have almost all of them apart from the first 4 and few of which I only have corrupted files. Initially, everything was restricted to using the sounds that came with the default sample disk, ST-01, but I later learned how to rip the samples from games and other modules. You have to understand that there was very limited availability for samples. There was no internet, no-one else I knew writing music or who could afford a sampler and synths, and so no other way of getting new samples, When the tunes started to become reasonable in quality (which was probably after I'd written around 30 of them), I would put some of them on a disk and give copies to people at the computer club.

One of the older guys there who took a copy, whose name escapes me, was friends with Dave Kelly who ran Consult Software, whose office was actually very close to the club's location. He gave the disk to him and a week or so later (I can't remember how he got my phone number), Dave phoned me up asking me to do the music for Last Ninja 2. I hadn't even known that Consult Software existed at that point.

The two major things to take away from this is that if you want to be successful in any creative industry you have to a) produce stuff. A lot of it. And b) Meet people. There is a huge amount of luck in this of course. In my case, the timing was just right as they were looking for someone right to do audio just as I appeared on the radar, but if I hadn't have made all of those tunes and met those people, the timing would have been irrelevant.

It was thanks to that same computer club that I got to do the music for Bill's Tomato Game and got a job at Psygnosis. One of the friends I made there, Chris Stanley, got a job as a tester at Psygnosis and he was responsible for introducing me to the company. Firstly by getting me to be an external tester, in which I would play beta versions of games and submit bug reports, and then later by offering my music services to the programmer when Bill's Tomato Game got signed. I'll be forever grateful to him for that. Later, I asked for a job there by writing to the producer of Bill's Tomato Game. I was there for 6 marvellous months as a Game Evaluator before I was switched to doing full-time audio, which was my plan all along of course. It wasn't the plan to be paid so badly, but nevertheless, I was a full-time member of the company that made Shadow Of The Beast and making music and sound effects all day.

Next: Psygnosis before the Playstation