Composers
Mark Knight: Chapter IV
What happened after EA? Did you go straight to Codemasters?
Well, after EA – and I left EA by choice, which doesn’t happen that often; normally it’s redundancy or studios closing. But, I had the opportunity to go on tour with a band called Massive Attack. So, I left EA. This had been something that I’d been talking about with the musical director for about six months. They had a world tour coming up and I kind of jokingly said, “Do you fancy an electric violin?.” And he turned around and said, “Yeah, that sounds great!” So, I left EA to do this with Massive Attack, but I was completely and utterly unprepared. I hadn’t any experience of touring at that sort of level at all and after two weeks, they decided that I wouldn’t be good enough so they dropped me.
Then I had to scrabble around and find another job, but I didn’t want to go back to EA..
Mark Knight: Chapter III
Let’s carry on. With the Mindscape era behind you, you were suddenly a free agent. Before you moved to a new dry harbor, you were hired to remix and rearrange a soundtrack for a PS1 port of FPS cult classic Duke Nukem 3D, called Total Meltdown. Interestingly enough, your version of the soundtrack is much more electronica-driven and some of the added material drifts off heavily from the original. For a PC gamer, it would be almost impossible to connect it with Duke at all. How come you chose this avenue?
I know. Another interesting little point with that is, if you can imagine Wing Commander should have never really run at all on Amiga, just like Duke Nukem should have never run on a PlayStation. It’s the same programmer, Nick Pelling, who did Wing Commander and Duke Nukem, which is why I got the gig to work on it.
Mark Knight: Chapter II
Let’s move back deeper into history again. 1992 was an important milestone for you as a musician. You were hired by a big and successful studio that developed games across many platforms. You are also known to arrange music for the Amiga port of Wing Commander, which had an excellent original soundtrack that I can easily backtrack in my memories. Perhaps even because of the fact I gave the game another complete playthrough not long ago. Was this the very first game you worked on?
It was the first full game I worked on. I wrote one track for a game before that: Guy Spy and the Crystals of Armageddon. Wing Commander was my first proper gig, I suppose, and it saved me in some ways because I had left college. I’d been turned down to do music technology at university because, and I quote, “Classical musicians can’t deal with music technology.” So, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. I was 18 or 19 years old, not going to university. I ended up filling out a form to do management training at one of the national supermarkets when Mindscape phoned and asked me if I was interested in working on Wing Commander.
Mark Knight: Chapter I
Hi Mark, do you still remember the very first moment you heard a chiptune? If so, how did it feel?
It depends on what you class as a chiptune, cause you can argue that anything written on C64 is a chiptune. Yeah, I do remember, because the C64 sound chip made a massive impression on me straight away. The first game I had was a cartridge game called International Soccer – and the sound was shit in that – but soon after that, there was a game called Forbidden Forest. I had three games early on: Forbidden Forest, Super Huey and then, a little bit later, Commando. Commando is one of Ron Hubbard’s best soundtracks and that blew me away. I fell in love with the C64 sound.