Interviews

"I was self-taught on the SID. I just sat down with the chip documentation and worked out what it could do. Nobody told me what to do - there were no rules, no tradition to follow. That was both frightening and liberating."

"Wizball was a special project. Jon gave me a brief that was essentially emotional - the world going from grey to colourful. That's not a technical brief, that's a compositional one. I had to write music that sounded like colour being restored. I'm not sure I ever fully achieved that, but I tried."

"Jarre was a huge influence. Oxygène, Équinoxe - that layered synthesiser approach, where every voice adds something and nothing is wasted. That's what I was always aiming for on the SID, even though I only had three voices. Tangerine Dream as well - the texture, the patience of it."

"The drum samples in Arkanoid - people ask how I got that sound out of a chip that wasn't designed for it. The answer is that you treat the volume register as a DAC. You write your sample data into it fast enough and the speaker produces the sound. It's not elegant, but it works. It just costs you a lot of CPU."

"I'm proud of Wizball. It's the piece I'm most associated with and I understand why. It has a depth that some of my other work doesn't - there's something actually being said there, musically. Whether I succeeded in saying it is for other people to judge."

"The loader music was interesting because you didn't have the luxury of a short piece. It had to loop gracefully, it had to work for however long the game took to load, and it had to be something people could bear hearing over and over. I think Ocean Loader 2 works because it's actually pleasant. It has a kind of... warmth."

"Three voices and a noise channel. That's it. But within that, the SID has a personality unlike any other chip. The filter especially - when you sweep that filter properly, the SID sounds organic. It breathes. That's what I was always trying to exploit."

"Green Beret was a game where I had to write something martial, aggressive. That's not my natural inclination - I tend toward melody over rhythm. But I pushed myself, and I think it works. The bass pattern especially has a relentlessness to it that suits the game."