Many people ask me how I found myself working in video games trying to gain some glimpse of how to break in. However, my journey into game audio is not the typical story. I did not take a game audio course, I didn’t intern anywhere – so how did I gain all these skills and end up making this my career?

I started out as a very active composer and community member in the “Amiga Demo Scene“ which believe it or not is acutally quite akin to the game development scene. A bunch of programmers, artists and computer composers getting together to make interactive art which pushed the boundaries of what the platforms could do at the time.

In the late 80’s, being an avid midi composer at a very young age, I was introduced  to .MODs (a 4 channel “mod tracker“ format) by my cousin who had a “Commodore Amiga 500” like myself.  After exploring how these were made, I found it extremely liberating from the restrictions that midi and midi keyboards had. I was able to create music using samples which meant I was only limited by creativity and channels. By studying other composers mods, I build up my own library of techniques how to push a multi-channel sound and mixing in 4 channels.

As IBM PCs became the home computer norm, the tools and technology improved, however the core techniques and methods of creating our music remained fairly consistent. 4 Channel .MODs became multi-channel .S3M “scream tracker format” , .XM “Fast Tracker 2“ followed by later “Impulse Tracker“ and 16bit samples with 44.1khz quality.

The friends I had met in the Demo Scene later started working in the video game industry as programmers, artists, and other audio professionals. Through these friendships I started getting requests to submit demos for various game projects.

I also found other people by all means of communication on the internet and started making friends and offering to help on any and all projects in any form of audio. I agreed to help one student project as a sound designer. I bought myself a decent starter mic, and used a mini disc and a self made XLR to 3.5″ mic cable. With this I designed my first 8 sound effects with nothing more than SoundForge and a lot of ambition. Needless to say they were the hardest sounds I had ever created.

By the time I was contract composing for my first titles, I started to attend GDC from around 2003. I was still working full time as a software engineer but after attending my first GDC I found that this was what I really wanted to do. I met a sound designer who was working at Lucas Arts and we talked about what he did. It inspired me so much, I thought – one day I was going to get there, and work at Lucas Arts. I had already started experimenting with sound design and knew a lot of audio processing from creating custom instruments  and had mastered the skill of creating fine loop points.

So I quit my programming career and enrolled in an Audio Engineering diploma to better my knowledge of audio, mixing, recording and studios hardware. Self taught gets you so far, but having access to a wealth of audio engineering knowledge was the next step for me.

During this time I landed a lot more projects. Some were purely composing, some purely sound design and others a combination. I took videos of game-play and started trying to design sound to them. This self taught, highly driven attitude to get somewhere really did pay off.

With past project life-cycle experience, software design, audio engineering, composing and game experience I landed my first role in-house 3 months after completing my audio engineering diploma. I was used to hitting the ground running, jumping in the deep end so to speak, so this was no different. I was promoted to lead very quickly.

I had made some other friends from GDC and picked up contract work. The company I was working for was impressed with my quality, and range of skills. I was headhunted when the first studio went through a mass layoff and  closed it’s doors. I landed the job after flying to the USA to interview on site for the position. I was only here for about 18 months when I was headhunted for LucasArts by a recruiter.

I actually did make it to a final interview for a sound designer position there, and spoke about intention of hire but I was self-bound to complete the project I was working on which would last another 5 weeks. Unfortunately the time period was too long as they had another candidate who was ready to start right away. I lost out, but then I was head-hunted for a local startup 2 weeks shy of completing the project .. this is where I became audio director at Trionworlds.

the rest is history…