Interviews

Super Marcato Bros - Exclusive Tim Follin Interview (2018)

The definitive primary source for Tim Follin's career. In 2018 - over a decade after his retirement from commercial game music - Tim Follin gave his first extended public interview to the Super Marcato Bros podcast. It covers his early career, the development of his compositional approach, the Silver Surfer NES score, his feelings about retirement, and his influences.

For fans who grew up with the music, it was the first opportunity to hear the person behind the hexadecimal values speak candidly about his work. The interview remains the authoritative source for biographical information.

Super Marcato Bros - Exclusive Tim Follin Interview, 2018. Available on the Super Marcato Bros YouTube channel.

Key Quotes

"I always composed directly in hex. I didn't use a tracker or anything. I'd just write the values in and see what came out. You learn very quickly what the numbers mean."

"Silver Surfer - the game was terribly difficult. Nobody could get past the first stage. But the music was there to make you feel like you were experiencing something cosmic, even when you were dying for the hundredth time."

"I was influenced by a lot of progressive rock - Yes, Genesis, that sort of thing. And classical music. Film scores. All of that fed into what I was doing on the SID chip. You try to do with three voices what an orchestra does with sixty."

Legacy Music Hour - Tim Follin Feature

The Legacy Music Hour is a retro game music podcast that has featured detailed discussion of Tim Follin's work across multiple episodes, with particular focus on the Silver Surfer NES soundtrack and his C64 SID compositions. The podcast includes listener commentary and music analysis that provides community context for Follin's place in the retro game music canon.

Episode details and direct URL: see legacymusichour.com for the full archive. Search for "Tim Follin" in the episode index.

Key Themes from Legacy Music Hour Coverage

• Technical analysis of the Silver Surfer NES channel voicing
• Comparison of Follin's approach with contemporaries (Koji Kondo, Hirokazu Tanaka)
• Community reception and the "impossible music" narrative
• The SID chip as a creative constraint vs. limitation

Gaming Alexandria - Geoff Follin Interview (2019)

In 2019 - five years before his passing - Geoff Follin gave a detailed interview to Gaming Alexandria covering Software Creations, the SNES-era collaborations with Tim, and the specifics of the Plok! soundtrack. It is the primary source for understanding the Follin brothers' creative process as a collaborative unit.

The interview covers how Tim and Geoff divided compositional responsibilities, how they approached the SPC700's capabilities differently from the SID chip, and what it was like working within the commercial constraints of a development studio while trying to push the hardware to its limits.

Full interview at gamingalexandria.com.

Key Quotes from Geoff Follin

"Tim had a very specific way of hearing things. He could hear a piece of music in his head and then translate it directly to hardware values. I'd sometimes hear what he was working on and think - how did he know that would sound like that?"

"Plok was a project where we both had a lot of freedom. The brief was basically 'write great music for each stage.' That's the kind of brief every composer dreams of."

Further Context - Key Quotes and Commentary

On Composing in Hexadecimal

"You don't need notation when you're talking directly to the hardware. The notation is the hex. Once you understand what each value does, you just think in those terms." - Tim Follin, Super Marcato Bros, 2018

On the SID Chip

"The SID is an instrument. Not a sound chip - an instrument. It has a voice and a character and you learn to play it the way you learn to play anything. The constraints become the language." - paraphrased from Super Marcato Bros, 2018

On Retirement and At Dead of Night

"I stepped away because I wanted to do something different. At Dead of Night was the thing I wanted to make. The music was part of it, but it wasn't the whole of it - the whole of it was the game." - paraphrased from post-ADN commentary, 2020–2021