David Whittaker was born in 1957 in Bury, Greater Manchester. A trained musician who arrived at the Commodore 64 in the early 1980s, he quickly established himself as one of the most prolific and technically accomplished composers of the 8-bit era. Where some colleagues focused on virtuosic performance, Whittaker focused on craft - building his own custom SID player driver in 6510 assembly and engineering a workflow that let him score game after game to a consistently high standard.
His first major credit, Lazy Jones (Terminal Software, 1984), contained a subtune called Stardust that would become one of the most-sampled pieces of game music in history. In 1999, German DJ duo Zombie Nation built Kernkraft 400 around it - a track that reached #2 on the UK Singles Chart and became a staple of football stadiums worldwide.
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Whittaker moved from the C64 to the Amiga, producing landmark scores for Psygnosis (Shadow of the Beast) and the Bitmap Brothers (Speedball, Xenon 2: Megablast). He later joined Electronic Arts USA (c. 1993) and subsequently became Head of Audio at Traveller's Tales, Knutsford.
Read the full career timeline or explore the SID music catalogue.