In The Chair: Barry Leitch
The legendary composer guides us through his truly fascinating career in videogames
What was it that made you start writing music on computers?
When I heard Rob Hubbard’s Synth Sample demo, it was like, ‘People are making music on these machines that sounds really good!’ I borrowed a BBC Model B over the summer and programmed a bunch of music into The Music System. If you ever run into a copy of Toccata in D Minor in The Music System, that was five days of my life, putting that in note by note.
How did you get your first commercial gig?
I was 14 or 15 and I started making demos. We were in the Compunet era, just going to computer clubs every week and swapping our demos. If you had some new demos, people would give you games and demos in exchange. I sent tons of demos to every videogame company in Britain and pestered them all, and they all said, ‘No kid, we don’t want your music, stop calling us.’ So I made more demos and sent them off, phoned them up again and said, ‘You should really check out my new demos, they are much better than the old ones.’ And finally Colin Fuige at Firebird said, ‘That one tune… I think we can use that one.’ Yes! I was an annoying little 15-year-old and I wanted to make music for games more than anything in the world, because it was that or go and do a real job – doctor, lawyer, accountant… ugh, I didn’t want to do any of that shit. I wanted to be Rob Hubbard. It took a long time before I got better – a good five years, just writing music every day before I had that ‘aha!’ moment, that this works and this doesn’t.
How did you join Imagitec?
We’d been at Catalyst Coders in Portsmouth, and they had severe financial difficulties. We were living on one Pot Noodle a day because we were so poor. We hooked up with Darren Melbourne, and he was trying to swing a deal where we’d set up a little studio in conjunction with Imagitec. And they were like, ‘You can come work in-house but we’re not wasting money on an office.’ Darren was geographically tied to London, I don’t think he wanted to move up north to Dewsbury. We’d all left Portsmouth and were living in a bedsit in London, which was rented out by these gangsters – you don’t pay the rent, you get concrete wellies. It was terrifying for 17 or 18-year-olds. I’d managed to do some freelance jobs, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer and Super Dragon Slayer. We had a few hundred quid come in, just enough to pay the rent for another couple of weeks. We were down to eating dry cornflakes. There was me and my girlfriend, the late Chris Edwards (the artist), Tom Pinnock
“I’ve moved like 33 times since I left home,” Barry tells us from his studio in Ohio, his Scottish accent revealing hints of an American twang. We ask if he had any musical training. “No, other than learning to play the recorder in school. In the end, they wouldn’t let me take my music O Level because I couldn’t play an instrument well enough. I was always interested in music but I was just too damn lazy to learn how to play the piano properly.” Instead, he became interested in computers, his earliest experience typing in listings and trying to make games on a ZX81. “Playing Flight Simulator on the ZX81 – ‘Oh my God, it’s so real!’”
I sent tons of demos to every videogame company in Britain and pestered them all Barry Lietch
and his girlfriend, and Gavin Wade and his girlfriend. Because I was the loudmouth of the group, they were like, ‘Let’s phone Imagitec and see if they still want to hire us.’ Side story: We did make a game in three days, Battlefield on the Commodore 64, just two tanks shooting each other…
I had to walk to the end of the street to the phone box. I phoned Imagitec and said, ‘See, if you send a van to London to pick us up, we’ll come and work for you.’ Martin Hooley got off the phone and he turned to his brother, ‘Get the van, go to London, pick up these kids and if they give you any shit dump them and take all their stuff.’ That’s how we ended up going to Imagitec, we arrived there in the van at seven in the morning, moved into the mill house which was just infested with vermin. Mice everywhere. But we thought this was great, we were living in the office, making videogames, what more to life could there be?
Xenophobe had an audio cassette of music with it, did you have fun making that?
That was actually played at Stringfellow’s nightclub, for the launch. This is the difference between publishers and developers. Publishers have all these nice things, cars, houses to live in. Developers lived under the desk. We had the idea: ‘What if we got more than one Amiga and fired them up with the mouse, we could just click play and start them all?’ So I arranged Xenophobe for 16 channels. Even with a button that clicked all four Amigas in time there was some drift in timing, you can hear it on the cassette.
What was the move from working with 8-bit systems to 16-bit ones like?
All of a sudden you had Soundtracker, you could create music with real samples. Before that it was all about your music driver, especially on the Commodore 64 – you had to have a state-of-the-art music driver, and be technically incredible to try and work in all these effects into three notes. You look at Rob Hubbard’s Spellbound piece and it’s insanely good. Changing to having real samples, it just levelled the playing field because I was no longer tied down to having bad music drivers, I now had bad samples as well!
Did you have your own 8-bit music driver?
At Imagitec, yes. I came up with a ‘unified data structure’ for all the music drivers. Because Imagitec were mainly a conversion house, if someone had this game they wanted it on Amiga, ST, C64, Spectrum, Amstrad, and so on. Rather than having to rewrite the music for each one, or rearrange music, I would write it on the Amiga and convert it to data statements, and then adjust the instruments on each platform. The AY, the C64, and it just speeded up the process. So we could do music across five or seven formats in an afternoon.
What did you like or dislike about the Amiga? It was great! It was four channels, and eventually it went up to eight channels with OCTAMED. We actually used an Amiga with OCTAMED to write the Inferno music with [the band] Alien Sex Fiend, controlling the MIDI synths and such. It was a real, constant evolution, those five or six years between 1986 and 1992 when CDS became accepted, it was just such a dramatic shift in technology. It was great riding that wave because things just got better and better. And the MT32 on the PC, that was an awesome piece of gear. Loved that sound card.
How did you come up with your idea for your iconic Lotus 2 tune?
It was actually a dream. I knew that Gremlin were doing another racing game and I was like, ‘I’m going to have to write racing music tomorrow,’ and I went home thinking, ‘What am I going to write?’ I woke up in the morning and I had an idea for a melody. ‘Quick, get to work and get this down before I forget it.’ The title tune was done in two hours, and
it turned out pretty good. At the time, we’d just got CD-ROMS and I still didn’t have any samplers or synths, and I tried ripping sounds from CDS. Pump Up The Jam, that’s where the chords came from. And the Yello samples, chick-chick-ah, Oh Yeah.
When did you start working on consoles?
The Super Nintendo, Gremlin, Top Gear… I had to go to Seattle, because the only way to make samples on the SNES was to use a £25,000 SUN workstation. Imagitec didn’t have one, and Gremlin didn’t, even Ocean didn’t have one. So they were like, ‘Why don’t you go to Seattle and Nintendo’s headquarters there, they have a sound studio there – take all your Amiga disks and see if you can convert them.’ We got there and the guy at Nintendo, he’s like, ‘We don’t have an Amiga.’ So we ask around and eventually one of the testers says, ‘I think I’ve got one in my garage.’ So we got an Amiga, the samples didn’t convert very well, I don’t know, it’s like 8-bit to 16-bit. And the Genesis… I hated the Genesis, because of the FM sound chip. I didn’t like the Adlib sound cards, because by then the MT32 was coming in. And so it was like, ‘We shouldn’t do Adlib we should just do MT32.’ But everybody’s got an Adlib card.
That must have been difficult in that era, trying to work out how music would sound across different PC setups.
I used to just write it all on the Amiga. We had a custom program at Imagitec that we also went on to develop further at Ocean called Medit. One of my mates, Les Long from Imagitec – I told him exactly what I wanted to do, load in the Amiga module and then add all the extra notes for the hardware capabilities, the extra channels. He’d written this program and eventually at Ocean we expanded it to work on the Super Nintendo.
You moved onto the N64, was that very different to work on?
Not really. Because by then we’d got XM, extended module files, so I would just write it in a tracker and it would play the files. Before that, I went to Origin Systems in Texas, working on PC games, and I did Ultima: Savage Empire on the Super Nintendo. Apparently it’s really quite rare, it’s like a Japanese-only release. I had to edit all 11,000 lines of dialogue for Wing Commander III. These are new jobs that were coming around, because before that we never had to bother much with in-game dialogue. That was an interesting technical challenge.
And you did some voiceover work yourself…
I was actually cast as the lead for Pirates Of Vooju Island. A voice actress I worked with, Lani Minella, she’s worked on so many games. I always work with her when I’m trying to get speech done. She phones me up one day, ‘I’ve got this job but they’re looking for someone with a Scottish accent. Do me a favour and audition for it.’ So I auditioned for it and she’s like, ‘You’ve got the part! I’ll be your session director, I’ll tell you how to do the lines, it’s easy-peasy.’ So it sounds quite easy, doesn’t it, you just go in front of a microphone and talk? But you’ve got to do it for eight hours, you’ve got someone in your ear saying, ‘No, say it more varied, more excited, you need to be more dramatic with this.’ You’re saying the same thing ten times and in your head it sounds like you’re saying it the way they want it, but it doesn’t quite come out that way. And it’s quite physically challenging, I could hardly talk and I was tired from standing up all day. It was very eye-opening into how much work goes into these things, and why a good voice actor is totally worth their money.
You also spent some time working with Fisher-price, the toy company. Was that a very different spell in your career?
I think it was a logical change. At Atari you could see things were taking a bad turn. They are cancelling games, they are not really developing any new IP, the arcade market’s going tits up, it was
We were living in the office, making videogames, what more to life could there be? Barry Leitch
horrible. I told my boss, ‘We need to get out of here.’ He’d been at E3 and this guy sitting next to him says, ‘I’m an audio guy, at Fisher-price toys. We’re actually looking for some audio guys, I don’t suppose you are interested?’ He came back from E3 and gave me the card, ‘Give this guy a call.’ So I went out to Fisher-price and had the interview. It was interesting because the technology in toys was just getting to that point where the Amiga was 20 years before. With a whole new set of limitations and rules, these little circuit boards… I was like, ‘I’m going to get out of the games industry for a bit…’ the original Xbox had just come out. I went to Fisher-price and worked on toys for four years and then went freelance. I’ve been doing mostly toys for the last 15… 16 years.
You’ve been involved in a few games recently, most notably the retro-inspired Horizon Chase. How did you get that gig?
They messaged me on Facebook: ‘Hey, we’re Brazil’s biggest games developer, we’re going to remake Top Gear, do you want to do the music?’ Quite often I’ll get people contact me trying to find out, how much do you charge for a piece of music or if they can get a piece of music for free and stick it in their demo and put it on Youtube.
So I was suspicious, and I talked to some buddies and they were like, ‘They are Brazil’s biggest game developer, but they’re in Brazil.’ I talked to them some more and found out they were really, really passionate about this game. I really only had one or two stills from the game when I started working on it, but I was really excited at the time. I don’t know, I saw the potential for where it might go and these guys were organised, they weren’t a couple of kids in their bedrooms sticking a game on mobile. These were guys who were going about it the right way.
And that led you to working with a real orchestra in Brazil…
It was a crazy experience, with Tommy Tallarico and Video Games Live. I saw Tommy posted on Twitter, ‘Every year I come to Brazil and they ask me to play Top Gear, we’re going to play it next year.’ He’d had people play it with the piano or violin, but he’d never done the full orchestral arrangement. And
I’m like, ‘I’m going to have to go to Brazil to hear my music.’ Every composer’s dream is to hear their music played by an orchestra. So I texted Tommy and said, ‘Want to get together to talk about this
Top Gear thing?’ And he’s like, ‘Sure, come on down, I’ll leave tickets at the front desk.’ So we go down there and Tommy’s like, ‘How’s your orchestra chops?’ And I’m like, ‘I’ve never written anything for an orchestra but I’ll fucking try!’ And he says, ‘If you want to do the arrangement, go ahead and do it. I’ll have my Hollywood orchestrator fix any mistakes you make so it won’t sound shit. And we’ll play it in Brazil.’ I go away and spend a month doing this huge orchestral arrangement – I did Top Gear and Horizon Chase as a medley, mixed into one. We went down to Rio, I took my buddy Brian with me. I had just got married, my wife had moved from Scotland to here [the US], so she couldn’t leave the country. We had a blast, man.
Every composer’s dream is to hear their music played by an orchestra Barry Leitch
Have you enjoyed being involved in the remix CDS over recent years?
Yeah, I’ve been having fun with them. I did a remix of Harlequin for the Amiga Power CD, which came out really good. And I did a remix of Spellbound on the C64, which is my tribute to the master himself. I don’t think I could have done any better than that, I put my heart and soul into that one. Rob’s never said that he liked any of my music, and I sent him the Spellbound remix and he’s like, ‘It’s not bad.’ So the irony that the only tune of mine he’s ever liked was one of his!
Would you ever go back to the old hardware and make new music?
I had to do some Amiga MODS last month, for an Atari Jaguar game. And it surprised me how difficult it was, how am I going to get all these samples in there? The new samples don’t sound as good as the old samples I had used.
Did you work on many unreleased games? There’s quite a few that got killed. There’s one I was really gutted about, which was a toy project that had all these wonderful licensed ROMS for it. Batman, Kung Fu Panda… kind of like Pixter but more for drawing, with a projector. I wrote a lot of tunes for that, a couple of them have made it out into other products but that was sad.
How do you view composing for modern games, and how much it’s changed?
It’s a lot easier. You don’t have to mess around with so many technical limitations; you can just write whatever you want. Top Gear I spent five days on the whole project, whereas with Horizon Chase, I think I spent more than five days just looking for the right sounds. These days you’ve got so many sounds to choose from, with plug-ins, VSTS, all of that fun stuff.
What’s the toughest deadline you’ve ever had ? When I was at Catalyst Coders, I did 72 hours straight once knocking out a bunch of C64 games that have never seen the light of day. These days
I try and avoid crunch as it gets counterproductive after a while. I used to work to the wee small hours a lot more, just because the phone stops ringing and people leave you alone. And it’s a great time of night to write lullabies, I write a lot of lullabies for kids toys.
What was your favourite machine to compose for?
I loved the MT32, just because we had the best music driver in the world for it. We would always compare ourselves to Origin Systems, because their music was great on the MT32. When I did TFX on PC, we spent a lot of time fucking around getting a really good guitar sound – because we were playing Strike Commander, and the guitar sound on that was really quite good. We found a little trick to make it sound like a distorted guitar. When I finally got to Origin I got to meet Nenad Vugrinec who was the composer for Strike Commander. We always used to argue about who had the best guitar sound on the MT32.
Was there a particular developer or publisher you loved working for?
I loved working at Ocean, the jewel in the crown of British software development. I loved working with Gary Bracey, I had such admiration for him. Growing up, working at Ocean’s your dream job. And eventually I got to work in the catacombs of Central Street. I was working in Martin Galway’s old office. I liked that, it was really the pinnacle of my career. Right around when technology was changing too, CDS were coming out, getting to work with Alien Sex Fiend. I really felt I could not go any higher in the British games industry. I felt like I had reached the absolute top.