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MR JENZIE: What was the most unusual soundtrack you created?

Age Of Tesla was interesting, because it was 16 channels. Eight channels were for Fifites swing style, eight were electronica. As you progressed it would turn off channels to switch slowly from one style to the other.

ERIC: What was your setup for doing Top Gear’s music?

We didn’t even have a Super Nintendo development kit. I had to go to Gremlin’s office, so I was sleeping on the programmer’s floor for a week. I phoned Kemco, ‘Have your audio guys send over some instrument samples.’ They sent over two floppy disks of shitty sounds, we’d asked for guitars and stuff. We had two different kick drums we could choose from, two snares. We just tried to pick the least annoying sounds and put the tunes together as quickly as possible so I could go home. It had eight channels but there was no way for me to create music in eight channels. We had the manual, but it’s all in Japanese. We found a ‘music.s’ file so I started changing things to see how the data’s stored. I found the DSP echo effect,

I’m showing the programmer, ‘Listen to that, that’s cool.’ He puts up some raster bars so he can see how much time it’s taking. ‘It’s taking all the memory, you’re not going to have that.’ So that’s why it’s got a tiny little echo on the sounds, the longest one I could put in.

NORTHWAY: Why can’t anyone do Gauntlet in 3D properly, and would you be up for a new spin on it?

Gauntlet Legends on the N64 was six months of my life. I put blood, sweat and tears into that one. There’s two hours of music in 1.5MB of cartridge space. I’d be totally down for it, as long as we can get some funding, because I got to be paid to keep the lights on. If you’re doing a Kickstarter, I’m in!