People

Matt Gray is a British composer born c. 1968 who came to prominence through the Commodore 64 SID chip music scene of the late 1980s. He is best known for his soundtrack to Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance (System 3, 1988) - a thirteen-subtune suite widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated SID compositions ever written.

Gray discovered the C64 in the mid-1980s and taught himself SID composition through experimentation and the active community of Compunet - a dial-up online service where UK C64 enthusiasts shared programs, demos, and music. His earliest SID music circulated there before securing commercial work.

Commercial work arrived in 1987 through Thalamus Ltd (Quedex, Hunter's Moon) and Incentive Software (Driller). The move to System 3 in 1988 produced Last Ninja 2 - a commission that demanded not just music but a complete audio system for the game. From 1989 to 1991 Gray worked across System 3 and Codemasters, producing Tusker, Dominator, Vendetta, Treasure Island Dizzy, and Micro Machines before transitioning to commercial dance music production.

He returned to the C64 community in 2014 with the Reformation crowdfunding campaign and remains active through his label 6581 Records and social media presence as @MattGrayC64.

Gray wrote his own SID player routines in 6502 assembly language - giving him direct control over the SID chip's three voices, the filter, and the ADSR envelopes. This technical foundation meant the music was conceived in terms of the hardware from the start, not transcribed from a score.

For melody sketching he used a 3-octave Casio keyboard - a modest instrument that imposed its own constraints on the compositional process, particularly in the range of melodic material he could physically play to verify a phrase before translating it into register values in assembly.

The Last Ninja 2 suite demonstrates Gray's characteristic approach: each SID voice given distinct melodic material rather than conventional melody/harmony/bass segregation. The Central Park cue in particular features a walking bass line with two independent melodic voices running against it - an ensemble texture unusual for the format.

The release of the Last Ninja 2 SID source code under Creative Commons allowed the community to study his player architecture and assembly routines directly - an act of unusual openness for the era.