In The Chair: Matt Furniss
The musical maestro chats to Graeme Mason about a fascinating career that spans 30 years
In an incredibly packed career spanning over 30 years, Matt Furniss has created many of the upbeat and bouncy tunes that accompany a slew of 16-bit games in particular. Retro Gamer talks to the audio expert about how he began in the industry, the tumultuous change to CD-ROM and more
While the 8-bit era featured its own selection of tunesmiths
– most notably
Martin Galway,
Ben Daglish, Rob
Hubbard, Tim
Follin and David
Whittaker – it wasn’t until the late-eighties and the rise of the 16-bit machines that composers were really let loose with their keyboards and imaginations. When the
Sony Playstation and CD-ROM became the new storage medium in the mid-nineties, every facet of games development changed considerably, not least the audio that could now be levelled up to include arrangements and compositions that completely mirrored their real-life counterparts. From his early days at Teque Software in Rotherham to working at The House Of Mouse, this is Matt Furniss, In The Chair.
Were you musical as a kid growing up? Oh yes. At home we owned one of those ubiquitous wood framed organs with bass pedals and a rhythm box. I could read basic music notation and play a few tunes on it and I’d perform Christmas carols at the school nativity show. I could also play simple things on the piano and enjoyed listening to electronic music such as Jean-michel Jarre and Kraftwerk. I became more interested in synthesisers and eventually upgraded to a Yamaha SY77 workstation.
Presumably videogames were a parallel love for you?
Absolutely. Growing up it was all about the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 and there were very few games consoles around. Like most of my pals, I had a Spectrum – the C64 was only for rich kids! Earlier, like many families in the Seventies, we had a Pong TV game. Very boring. Fortunately, I could rent an Atari 2600 or Mattel Intellivision with games from the local video shop, which I’d do as often as possible! Then, when the ZX81 was released, I got one of those. My dad would take me to a computer club run by British Telecom engineers where I got copies of ZX81 games such as 3D Monster Maze and Kong. Not exactly the full arcade experience, but passable if you squint and use your imagination.
What games did you enjoy on your Spectrum? I’d play anything and everything. I loved all the Ultimate games of course, but a couple of favourites I played more than anything were Steve Crow’s Starquake and Wizard’s Lair.
Which games first inspired you musically?
Konami’s Gyruss is the first arcade game I remember hearing that had amazing music – an arrangement of Bach’s Toccata And Fugue, similar to the version by Seventies prog-rock band, Sky. Paperboy and Marble Madness were another two games I thought had excellent music. Atari’s arcade games always had superior sound hardware and brilliant compositions.
When did you first realise that you might want to get into the games industry as an audio designer?
One lucky day would change everything for me. In the late-eighties I spent a lot of time missing school and loitering around a computer game shop in Sheffield. The shop was called Just Micro and it was a bustling Aladdin’s cave of computers and games. It was owned by Ian Stewart who also founded Gremlin Graphics, both businesses located on Carver Street in Sheffield. Occasionally the Gremlin programmers would bring unfinished games down to the shop to show a preview of what they were working on.
That must have been very exciting!
It was. I remember playing an early version of
Auf Wiedersehen Monty and being in total awe of the amazing Commodore 64 music. Then, one time in the shop, the manager told me Gremlin needed some urgent playtesting. I could go up to the development office and play games and my remuneration was a can of pop and a bag of crisps! So I went up and played MASK on the Commodore 64 for a bit – but what I really wanted to do was meet Ben Daglish.
Ben was Gremlin’s main sound designer – what did they say?
I asked and they said, ‘Sure, he’s over there in
that office.’ Ben was so gracious and generous with his time and I was already a big fan and totally starstruck. We chatted for a while and he showed me his Atari St-based setup. He was using Steinberg Pro 24 sequencer software to write his music and control his gear. Ben made me a copy of the software and that was the final piece I needed for my home setup. It was such a big inspiration meeting Ben Daglish – I’m sure my career path would have been a lot different had I not been fortunate enough to meet him.
Talking of career path – what was your first job in the industry?
In the summer of 1989 I left school and was offered a job at Teque Software/krisalis in Rotherham. The first music I created there was for Laser Squad, an Amiga and Atari ST remake of the classic ZX Spectrum game. The same year I also worked on Toobin’, Shadow Warriors and Chase
HQ. I played Toobin’ a lot while converting it as we had an arcade machine in the office. Hard Drivin’ I played only a couple of times in an arcade – it was hard, and expensive, one pound per credit! Then, the DOS version of Laser Squad was one of my first games working with Sound Blaster and Roland’s LAPC-1 sound card.
How did you get the job at Teque Software?
I spent a lot of the summer that year sending out demo tapes of my Amiga demo scene music, to zero success. Then, to my delight, Teque replied to my application as they needed someone to make game sounds and digitise graphics. Teque was local to my home, only a bus ride away, and they took me on a trial for a month before hiring me full-time after that. I never did get to digitise any graphics, though.
With whom did you work most closely at Teque?
I worked with Shaun Hollingworth. We shared an office and an interest in music. I would design the sound editors and drivers and Shaun would program them.
How did the process work on those early arcade conversions? Did you try and copy the arcade music?
That’s right, I’d convert the music by ear. If I had access to the arcade machine, I’d connect a tape recorder to the audio output, load up the operator sound test and record all the music and sound effects to tape. Then I would try and squeeze it all into the small bit of memory available for the home versions, and usually there wasn’t enough memory for everything. But other times there would be space I could use for an original title screen tune.
Sounds like you were a big arcade fan?
Definitely. My favourites were from Atari and Sega. 720º, APB, Out Run, After Burner and so on. I remember one summer we went to Alton Towers and I spent most of the day ignoring the rides and hanging out around the arcade, just staring at Space Harrier, astounded by its incredible sound and graphics.
What machines did you use to create your sound effects and music?
Most of my development software ran on an Atari Mega ST – basically a regular ST but with more RAM. Shaun Hollingworth [Way Of The Tiger, Bounder, Pac-mania] wrote the software and built custom hardware for the Sega and Nintendo consoles. For Amiga audio, I used an A500 with 20MB HDD and Pro Tracker, as did many composers back then.
What was your own first home computer love? Actually, the Amiga wasn’t my first love. A couple of years prior I did buy an Atari ST, mostly to play games. As a stand-alone audio machine the ST was pretty weak. It did however include standard MIDI ports, allowing it to be connected to digital instruments such as synthesisers, drum machines and samplers. So my setup was the Atari ST and a nice Yamaha
SY77 synthesiser, but I had no sequencer software to control it. At that point I was pretty disappointed and would have preferred to own an Amiga.
Which of the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga was better from an audio designer’s viewpoint? The Atari ST’S built-in sound hardware was quite weak other than the included MIDI ports. It was a very basic sound chip even for 1985. The Amiga, on the other hand, was far superior and still sounds great today!
Which other composers and musicians did you admire or influence you?
Most of my influences back then came from other videogames musicians. Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, Maniacs Of Noise, Tim Follin, Yuzo Koshiro. I was a big Amiga demo scene fan too – some of those old demos have incredible music.
Did you try and ensure each musical composition was sufficiently different to your other work?
I tried, but it was always difficult. I developed a funky, percussive style which is reflected in most of the games I worked on. Fortunately, quite a lot of my work was conversions and arrangements from other composers – it added variety and helped alleviate any writer’s block.
How was publisher interfer- erm, guidance back then?
There was very little guidance and I loved it! Publishers just wanted the audio done on time and easy for the programmers to implement. It was about a 50/50 split on original compositions and conversions and amazing how much latitude I was given to improvise or arrange the original music.
In the early Nineties you moved to console development, specifically Sega’s Mega Drive. What was that period like?
I loved creating sound for the Mega Drive. At Krisalis we didn’t have access to the official Sega sound development kit or even GEMS, which many Us-based composers used. Shaun Hollingworth again came through and created a custom audio dev system, hardware and driver – and it sounded amazing! Especially the sampled audio, which I still think is some of the best heard on the Mega Drive. I wrote quite a lot of Sega Master System and Game Gear music, too. A few titles on Super Nintendo and 3DO and even the music for an Atari Lynx game, European Soccer Challenge.
You were banging out a lot of tunes in this period – was it hectic?
At the time it didn’t seem hectic. But looking back at how much work I did, it must have been. I usually had four or five projects on the go, and would have only had a couple of weeks to complete each job.
Konami’s Gyruss is the first arcade game I remember hearing that had amazing music Matt Furniss
Talking of Shaun Hollingworth and his system – do you have a favourite memorable project on the Sega Mega Drive using this?
One of the more memorable was The Terminator.
It was the first time I really dialled-in the sound and made the Mega Drive sound good, or at least a lot better than my projects that preceded it. Brad Fiedel’s movie soundtrack really suited the Mega
Drive sound hardware, although in hindsight I should have used more music from the movie.
Any other favourites from this time?
Puggsy, Mortal Kombat II, Mickey Mania, Alien 3. They were great to work on, and excellent games too. Wiz ‘N’ Liz was a favourite – it’s got lots of different music and is a really fun and fast game.
Did movie licence work involve creating your own tunes, adapting film music or both?
I’d prefer to use the movie soundtrack and arrange it for the game, but that wasn’t always possible due to licensing. Predator 2, for example, was original music and being my first Mega Drive music, it’s not very good. On the flip side, Probe did a great job converting Mortal Kombat II to the home consoles. I was tasked with bringing Dan Forden’s incredible music to the home systems and I had to do it by ear from DAT tape recordings. The Mega Drive’s sound hardware was not as powerful as the Mortal Kombat II arcade machine’s, so I used a bit of artistic licence to arrange the converted soundtrack. The Sega 32X audio is much closer to the arcade with more digitised speech and sound effects from the original game.
You worked on a couple of less popular systems such as the 3DO – what was that like?
I had a very short-lived 3DO – I was sent a dev kit from America that I fried by connecting it to 240 volts! [We’ve all been there – Ed]
Oops! Moving quickly on, did you usually see games running in order to compose the audio or work off screenshots and descriptions?
Early on it was normal to have only a text description of the game. I’d receive a fax at the office containing game details and what was needed audio-wise. Finished audio was stored on a floppy disk and returned via the post. If the game was being developed in-house we generally had the arcade machine in the office. I could hook up a tape recorder to the audio output and capture original sounds from the machine’s diagnostic mode. A few years later, a modem was acquired and I set up a BBS [Bulletin Board System]. Developers would upload ROMS to me and I would run them on my local development kit. They would download audio from me and then include it in the game.
By 1992 you were working on a lot of games but eventually moved on from Teque/krisalis. What happened?
I was working at Krisalis until 1994, but the 16-bit work was drying up around that time as publishers switched to next generation CD-ROM consoles. I then took a job at one of Sony’s studios in Gloucestershire, working on new Playstation games such as Assault Rigs, Darkstalkers and G-police.
At Sony, most of my output was sports games featuring licensed music from popular music artists and bands Matt Furniss
What was audio development like on the Playstation?
Sony’s official Playstation One audio dev system was pretty awful. It was an Apple Mac expansion card and software. The system was really buggy and it crashed all the time.
Can you remember what your first CD-ROM tune was?
I’m not certain but it could have been the 3DO version of Cannon Fodder or maybe Soccer Kid.
What did the shift to CD-ROM mean for you? When CD-ROM arrived, we invested in ‘proper’ studio gear like a multirack, mixing desk and sequencer. It wasn’t easy; I had no training on how to operate the equipment so learned it all on the job. It also meant the end of the 16-bit era and a few cancelled projects – I was working on Mega Drive versions of Blood Money, Shadow Of The Beast III and Bill’s Tomato Game. The latter was eventually ROM dumped after a prototype dev cartridge appeared on ebay.
Having worked extensively with the CD-ROM format, what was it like going back to cartridge with games such as the Nintendo 64’s Excitebike 64?
That was a bit of unexpected luck. Leftfield’s [Excitebike’s development team] audio guy became
unavailable midway through development so they asked me to step in and finish the project.
Why did things slow down in the late-nineties? In 1996 I moved to the USA to work for Disney Interactive and later, Sony’s 989 Studios in San Diego. CD-ROM had arrived and made it possible for any composer to write videogame music. The requirement of technical ability and size constraints became a non-issue. The teams became much larger and development cycles were longer. At Sony, most of my output was sports games featuring licensed music from popular music artists and bands.
In 2010 you reunited with an old colleague from the Mega Drive days, David Perry.
I received a message from a recruiter who was hiring developers for a new start-up in Aliso Viejo, California, called Gaikai. At the time I was actually living in Aliso Viejo while working as a software engineer for Fox Interactive Media in Santa Monica.
Crikey, that’s a commute and a half!
A 120-mile round trip – in Los Angeles traffic! I was ready for a move to something closer to home. As for Gaikai, it was developing a new technology to allow gamers to stream games from remote servers without requiring large downloads. I was interested, replied and then it was revealed that one of the Gaikai cofounders was David Perry with whom I’d worked with briefly on The Terminator. After a quick meet and greet, Gaikai hired me as their first frontend web developer. What a small world!
What did that role entail?
I built the code which allowed Gaikai’s game streaming to run on any web browser or website. A few years later, Gaikai was acquired by Sony and rebranded as Playstation Now – I was back at Sony for a third time. That was pretty good fun and I saw us grow from 15 people to over 200.
What were the most fun projects to work on? The most fun games were the ones that needed original music and where I had creative control. Such as, Puggsy, Alien 3, Wiz ‘N’ Liz, The Terminator and Soccer Kid.
And conversely, which were the most onerous projects that you can remember?
Most of the time-consuming projects were for American publishers. They would often have a hierarchy of producers and game directors to satisfy, which usually meant revisions and edits.
How has the role of musician and audio designer changed during your career?
In the beginning, it was just me writing all the music and sound effects with very little oversight. I just did the work and usually it would be added to the game as-is. When I began working with larger publishers like Sony and Activision, there was more collaboration with producers, creative directors and other sound designers. They would have more influence on the sound design and it could be more difficult. But the end result was sometimes worth it.
I think we may know the answer to this one – what period do you look back on most fondly? The Sega Mega Drive days, definitely – a golden era for me. I loved that console and even bought a Japanese import before they were available in Europe. Playing the games and hearing all the amazing music coming from Japan was special, as was the challenge of pushing the hardware to the limit. In the early Nineties I saw a magazine advert for a console import shop – they had all the latest hardware and games from Japan such as PC Engine, Super Nintendo and Mega Drive. The shop’s address was in Newcastle-under-lyme. I’d never heard of the town and assumed the advert had misspelled Newcastle-upon-tyne. So I went there instead – stop laughing – and unsurprisingly I couldn’t find the store. It was an extremely long drive from Sheffield. Don’t do what I did, read a map!
Is there anything you’d do differently looking back on it today?
I’d have a wider taste in music and learn more music theory. Maybe work collaboratively more with other artists. And be nicer to everyone – I learned too late that you get more with sugar than salt.
You’re no longer directly involved in the videogames industry – do you miss it?
I don’t miss the games business particularly, no. From what I hear, working for a large developer these days can be a bit of a grind. I’m fortunate to have been around in the golden age of gaming; but working for Gaikai and Sony for the third time was pretty good as well. I felt part of the videogame business again without the pressure of being a game developer.
Our thanks to Matt for his time.