Trivia

Composing Entirely in Hexadecimal

Tim Follin never used a tracker, a sequencer, or standard musical notation for his early game compositions. He composed directly in hexadecimal values - numbers that represent pitch frequencies, note durations, volume levels, and channel commands on the target hardware. He learned what each value produced by listening to the result, building an internal dictionary that translated between numbers and sound without the mediation of conventional notation.

This approach, described in the 2018 Super Marcato Bros interview, explains both the idiosyncratic quality of his melodies - which sometimes move in ways that conventional notation would make awkward - and his productivity: there was no translation step between idea and hardware output.

"Playing the SID Chip Like an Instrument"

The phrase appears repeatedly in community discussion of Tim Follin's C64 work, and it captures something specific: Follin did not use the SID chip as a three-voice playback device, but as an instrument with its own voice and character that could be played expressively. He exploited the analogue filter - designed for static timbre shaping - as a dynamic, real-time expressive tool, sweeping it mid-note to simulate brass attacks, string swells, and vocal inflections.

The result is SID music that feels performed rather than programmed - music with dynamics and articulation that the chip's designers did not explicitly intend. This approach is most clearly audible in Ghouls 'n Ghosts (C64, 1989) and Qix (C64, 1990).

The "Technical Impossibility" of NES Silver Surfer

Listeners frequently describe the Silver Surfer NES soundtrack as containing more simultaneous voices than the hardware supports. The NES audio architecture provides five channels: two pulse wave generators, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and one DMC channel. Silver Surfer uses all five simultaneously, with each channel carrying a distinct musical role.

The "impossibility" is perceptual: the density of voicing - three-part counterpoint, bass, and percussion, all interacting in real time - creates the impression of more than five simultaneous sound sources. This is a compositional technique, not a hardware hack: Follin's voice leading is so efficient that each channel seems to carry more musical weight than its hardware role should allow.

Oscilloscope visualisations of Silver Surfer Stage 1 make the channel distribution visible - see the Videos page for the embed.

The Markiplier Moment - At Dead of Night Goes Viral

In late 2020, YouTube creator Markiplier (Mark Fischbach, then with approximately 30 million subscribers) played At Dead of Night, Tim Follin's 2020 indie horror game, in a widely watched series. The playthrough introduced Tim Follin's name and creative voice to an audience for whom 8-bit game music was not a primary frame of reference.

The viral moment prompted a new wave of discovery of Tim Follin's earlier work - particularly the Silver Surfer and Solstice NES soundtracks - by viewers who had grown up after the home computer era. It is frequently cited as the event that moved Tim Follin from "revered within the retro community" to "known to a broader gaming audience."

The Geoff Follin Collaboration - How It Began

Geoff Follin's entry into game music followed a similar path to Tim's: through the family connection to Software Creations via Mike Follin. While Tim had been the studio's primary composer since the mid-1980s, Geoff began contributing to projects in the early SNES era, with the brothers initially working on separate titles before beginning to collaborate directly.

The collaboration deepened into the co-composition model that produced Plok! - where credits and responsibilities were shared across the entire score rather than divided by tracks. In the 2019 Gaming Alexandria interview, Geoff described the working relationship as one where the brothers would play ideas to each other and make decisions together, rather than working in isolation.

The Unreleased SNES Firearm Soundtrack

Firearm is a SNES game that was in development at Software Creations but never released commercially. Tim Follin composed music for the game, and the soundtrack exists in the community's awareness through oscilloscope visualisations that have circulated on YouTube, showing music of considerable quality and characteristic Follin complexity.

The existence of the Firearm soundtrack raises questions about what else may remain in the Software Creations back catalogue - unreleased titles with Follin compositions that have never been publicly documented. It is one of the few known examples of unreleased Tim Follin work.

Search YouTube for "Firearm SNES Follin" to find community-uploaded oscilloscope visualisations of the known tracks.

The Silver Surfer Game - Difficult by Design?

Silver Surfer (NES, 1990) is notorious for its extreme difficulty - the game is considered one of the hardest NES titles ever released, with a hitbox that includes the entire screen border and projectiles that move at exceptional speed. Many players never advance past the first stage.

The cruel irony is that the game's exceptional music rewards survival through stages: each area has a distinct Follin composition, but most players only ever hear Stage 1. Oscilloscope visualisations and longplay videos have served the function of making the full soundtrack accessible to players who could not survive long enough to hear it in context.

Geoff Follin - In Memoriam (died May 2024)

Geoff Follin passed away in May 2024. The retro gaming and game music community mourned the loss of a composer whose contributions to the SNES era - particularly on Plok!, Equinox, and Spider-Man and the X-Men - represent some of the finest music produced for the platform.

Geoff's death came after he had begun re-engaging with the retro game music community through the 2019 Gaming Alexandria interview and subsequent online interactions. His willingness to discuss his work in detail during this period means that his voice is preserved as a primary source, even as his absence from future conversations is deeply felt.