People

Tim Follin

Composer - ZX Spectrum, C64, NES, SNES, Dreamcast, PC

Born around 1970 in England, Tim Follin is a self-taught composer with no formal music education. His influences - progressive rock, classical music, and film scores - are audible across his entire catalogue, but the medium was always the constraint: he composed in hexadecimal values directly on the target hardware, learning each chip's quirks and exploiting them as expressive tools.

Tim's career at Software Creations in Manchester spanned the full 8- and 16-bit era, from ZX Spectrum beeper music in the mid-1980s through C64 SID mastery, NES programming wizardry, and SNES orchestral work alongside his brother Geoff.

He retired from commercial game music composition around 2005, largely absent from public life until his 2018 Super Marcato Bros interview - the primary biographical source for his career. In 2020 he returned as game director of At Dead of Night, a live-action horror adventure released on PC.

Geoff Follin

Composer - SNES, collaboration partner (in memoriam)

Geoff Follin was Tim's brother and his primary creative partner during the SNES era at Software Creations. Their collaboration on Plok! (1993) is widely regarded as the apex of their joint work - a soundtrack of orchestral breadth and rhythmic invention that remains a benchmark for SNES audio.

In 2019, Geoff gave an extended interview to Gaming Alexandria, discussing Software Creations, the SNES hardware, and the Follin brothers' creative process. It stands as the most detailed account of the SNES-era collaboration.

Geoff Follin passed away in May 2024. The retro gaming community mourned the loss of a composer whose work shaped the sound of an era. His contributions to Plok!, Spider-Man and the X-Men, Equinox, and other SNES titles remain as his enduring legacy.

Mike Follin

Programmer - Software Creations

Mike Follin, the oldest of the three brothers, was a programmer at Software Creations in Manchester. His presence at the studio created the opportunity for Tim - and later Geoff - to contribute music to the games being developed there.

Mike is credited as programmer on several early Software Creations titles for ZX Spectrum and C64, and his technical work forms the context within which Tim's musical experiments were possible. The Follin family connection to Software Creations is the through-line of Tim's entire formative career.

Software Creations

Development Studio - Manchester, England (1987–late 1990s)

Software Creations was a Manchester-based development studio that produced work for publishers including U.S. Gold, Activision, Arcadia, American Softworks, LJN, and Sony Imagesoft. The studio was the home of Tim Follin's commercial output from approximately 1987 through the mid-1990s.

As a second-party developer, Software Creations ported and developed original titles across an extraordinary range of platforms simultaneously - C64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad, NES, SNES - which meant Tim Follin routinely had to produce music for several different hardware architectures within the same project.

The studio closed in the late 1990s as the development landscape shifted to 32-bit and 3D platforms. Its legacy is carried primarily by the music of Tim and Geoff Follin, which is better preserved and more widely celebrated than the games themselves.