Jeroen Tel

Jeroen Tel was born in 1972 in Eindhoven, Netherlands. In his teenage years he found the Commodore 64 and the demo scene - and the SID chip found him. Under the handle WAVE, he became one of the most sought-after commercial game composers of the late 1980s, crafting soundtracks that defined an era.

In 1987, together with Charles Deenen, Marcel Donné, and others, he co-founded Music on Noise (MoN) - a collective that would go on to score dozens of C64 and Amiga games for publishers including Hewson Consultants, Ocean Software, System 3, Thalamus, and Virgin Games.

His breakthrough came with Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine (Hewson Consultants, 1988). The title theme demonstrated a new level of polyphonic complexity on the SID chip. The following year, Cybernoid II: The Revenge elevated that standard further still - widely regarded as one of the finest C64 compositions ever written.

Tel went on to score Hawkeye, Myth: History in the Making, Supremacy: Your Will Is Our Command, and many more. His Amiga work brought MOD-based orchestration to bear with the same precision he had applied to the SID chip.

Tel’s commercial debut came in 1988 with Cybernoid: The Fighting Machine (Hewson Consultants) - a polyphonic SID title theme that earned a Zzap!64 Gold Medal and announced a composer the C64 scene would not stop talking about. The following year, Cybernoid II: The Revenge went further still: five subtunes, 208 seconds of main theme, a filter used as a compositional instrument rather than a timbral afterthought. Community consensus across thirty-five years places it among the finest SID compositions ever written.

1988 also saw Hawkeye (Thalamus) - a kinetic shooter score that shows a different Tel entirely: harder waveforms, pulse-width modulation pushed to the wall, driving rhythm where Cybernoid was melodic and expansive. The same year, two flagship works from a teenager who had not yet turned 17.

In 1989, Myth: History in the Making (System 3) presented the most ambitious brief of Tel’s C64 era: music for ancient Greece, Egypt, and Arthurian Camelot, each with a distinct cultural character, within three SID voices. The result is one of the most compositionally wide-ranging soundtracks of the period.

By 1990, Supremacy: Your Will Is Our Command (Virgin Games) marked Tel’s move to the Amiga tracker format - four minutes of precisely constructed electronic music before the player makes a single decision in the galactic strategy game. The same compositional discipline, a richer palette.

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In 1987, Tel co-founded Music on Noise (MoN) with Charles Deenen, Marcel Donné, and others - a Dutch collective that would go on to score dozens of C64 and Amiga commercial releases for publishers including Hewson Consultants, Thalamus, System 3, Ocean Software, and Virgin Games. The group emerged from the Netherlands demo scene and brought its technical seriousness into the commercial market.

MoN’s members each brought a distinct approach to chip composition: Tel was the melodic architect, Deenen the technical pioneer who later became a leading figure in triple-A game audio. Reyn Ouwehand, Leitch, and Bjerregaard expanded the collective’s range across styles and platforms. Together they defined what a Dutch chip music collective could be in the golden era of the C64.

Meet the full Music on Noise collective