Magnetis

My friend Romain “Nino” Gauthier was the Audio Supervisor while I worked at Gameloft. He is one of the most passionate game makers I know, and has the sort of talent which attracts other talented people to work with him. Makes sense, then, that he started his own game development studio and is making a game involving magnetism!

Paris-based Yullaby has been climbing the ranks since 2006, and they are very close to releasing an awesome-looking puzzle game on WiiWare called Magnetis. It has a really cool mechanic and an incredible soundtrack by Nino himself. Check it out:

http://wiiware.nintendolife.com/news/2009/06/magnetis_wiiware_trailer

Support startup developers! Keep an eye out, or check back here often; I’ll announce as soon as it’s through Nintendo approval and released to the public.

Michael…

Words are failing me. I’m ignoring all news and entertainment media, and am very likely to tune out preemptively when MJ is brought up in internet chats or forums. I apologize in advance, but it’s still too much to process.

Know that I’ve shifted some priorities today, with the intent to send him off musically through my own expression of lifelong gratitude and love.

Happy Father’s Day!

One of the things driving me forward in my career is the encouragement of my parents. Although my choices rarely depend on their approval, I’ve nonetheless felt it has been there through most of my adulthood. Today, I want to tell you about my Dad. For anyone who didn’t get to meet him at my wedding, he’s equal parts comedian, muse, mad scientist, and older/wiser clone of me. He stowed a Harry Potter wand in his glove compartment, in case people cut him off in traffic and he had to Crucio a fool.

A fine fingerstyle guitarist, banjo picker, bass player, and singer, he taught me never to stop learning, to always be curious, and that sometimes people will think you’re nuts, no matter how hard you try to explain yourself, and that’s okay. It was following in his example that I became a self-taught musician. After a childhood during which he and Mom could easily have justified shipping me one-way to Mogadishu, I have grown up to feel mighty proud of all the good he’s done — not just for me, but for hundreds (thousands?) of students.

The local newspaper had this to say about him, last year:

Sixth-graders at Hammocks Middle School can’t wait to get to their science class. Walking up the stairs with anticipation, they already can hear their teacher, Harvey Kaufman, warming up.

Kaufman has been teaching science for 14 years at Hammocks Middle, 9889 Hammocks Blvd. When school began this year and he was faced with a less-than-desirable textbook, Kaufman searched for a way to increase interest in learning. While outlining his next lecture, the words on the paper formed into a song, and he grabbed an upright bass. Immediately, he had his first song, Heart of the Matter. Since then, Kaufman has been combining his passion for teaching science with his love for playing the guitar and creating a series of songs that teach his students basic scientific concepts.

I think it’s pretty easy to see how this kind of mindset has affected me, and made it clear that I can do anything I set out to, as long as I do it passionately. Now, conveniently, it’s my turn to make my Dad proud:

Red Faction Guerrilla, my first big next-gen console game, is now in stores, with ads all over TV. It is an action game set on Mars with a destruction simulation that antiquates anything seen before. The game is based around the fact that you can destroy any structure — no hiding place is safe, no building too fortified — and when you do, it breaks apart realistically, not in a pre-determined manner, but with real physics. Glass raining down, rebar everywhere, clouds of dust. It is literally a summer blockbuster.

For an audio team, this is a huge challenge. On top of the normal list of sounds any game needs, we had to design and perfect a system that hooked into the physics simulation, and create a massive array of breaking, crunching, rolling, tearing, shearing, and shattering noises for each type of material. Buildings groan audibly under stress, bridges create a hellish racket as they catastrophically fail, and each chunk of concrete makes its own distinct smack as it rains down on the rusty Martian landscape.

If you can’t already tell, I’m extremely passionate about this game, and highly satisfied with the results. I did the following things:

- Collaborated with Raison Varner, Dan Wentz, and Josh Davidson (all current or former in-house Volition sound men) to compose all of the in-game music. Tim Wynn scored the titles and cinematic cut-scenes with a live orchestra, and I tied his various themes back into the in-game music, so the whole presentation was cohesive and flowing. Music4Games wrote an article featuring the score.

- Revised, mixed, processed, and implemented all of the above music. We used a Raison-designed interactive music system which reacts to how badly you’ve pissed off the bad guys at any given time. It transitions between spacey underscore and two intensities of heroic combat. Each of these, in turn, consists of dozens of segments several bars long, which traverse a flowchart semi-randomly. It was important to write each segment with this in mind, since you never know which of 6 other segments may come next. There are several distinct “collections” of segments, each with about an hour of material, which are introduced as the story unfolds. I also wrote 6 shorter but more intense “collections” to get your blood pumping when you’re engaged in a mission, and for a certain activity where you race a timer to inflict property damage.

- Did a ton of sound design under my freakishly energetic coordinator Kate Nelson, who organized everything from music to voice acting under ridiculous pressure. I made sounds for weapon firing and handling, “clutter object” collisions / explosions / ambient noises, multiplayer “backpack” power-ups, the main destruction system which is the centerpiece of the game (polishing and revising Raison’s first pass), the little fanfare that plays on the news kiosks (the notes spell out the name of the game’s villains, or “EDF”), and various odds and ends.

- Stress-tested functionality of music and sound with the help of programmers Steve DeFrisco and Aaron Gresch, and ultra-skilled QA Testers Kelly McMorris, Mike Bianca, and Kristi Kaufman, who ensured that few audio bugs were shipped in the final game, and that I kept my sanity.

So, Dad, it’s my hope that by relishing every minute of life, using the talents I inherited to their fullest, and loving my family throughout challenges and celebrations alike, I can make you feel justified not only for the twinkle in your eye in 1980, but for resisting the near-daily temptation to drive us to the Everglades and throw me to the alligators. Happy Father’s Day!

Kind of Bloop

Show of hands: Who would like to hear me, beek, Shnabubula, Disasterpeace, and Sergeeo cover Miles Davis with video game hardware?

Because that’s exactly what’s about to happen. Talk about big shoes to fill.

Rampage Original Soundtrack

I have just uploaded my original soundtrack to Rampage [Korkusuz], also known as Turkish Rambo.

It is yours now, free.

Please, please, please show your support for the producer, Ed Glaser, and buy the film for yourself and your loved ones. It’s not something you have to be an internet meme nerd to “get”, it’s simply an awesome dubbed foreign action film. There are many reasons to get the DVD: amazing box art, a collectible poster, commentary tracks, and interviews with me and the actors. It will put all of these cues in context, but I felt it was important to get the music out there — I put a lot of work into it and wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy!

RAMPAGE (TURKISH RAMBO) now on DVD!

So. If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the past 4 months, the answer is:

RAMPAGE.

Also known as Korkusuz. Also known as TURKISH RAMBO.

To quote from the site,

“From the director of TURKISH STAR WARS and TURKISH JAWS comes RAMPAGE, an epic tale of murder and mayhem, vengeance and destruction, betrayal and kebabs. Now, Dark Maze Studios is bringing it to DVD for its first official release in 23 years! We sent an elite commando squad to rescue the film from a remote Turkish vault and digitally remastered it… because no one else would dare.”

The film is out on DVD right now, and I’ve spent the past bunch of months giving it a COMPLETELY ORIGINAL soundtrack, sound design, and hilariously straight-ahead English dub along with my super-awesome friend and creative cohort, Ed Glaser. Yes, that Ed Glaser. And the crowd is going wild — even the inimitable Spoony is giving it love.

You can (and should) read (a lot) more about the film at Dark Maze’s blog, including details on all the special features, and ways you street-team types can help us promote the film.

For the virt junkies out there, you may also be excited to know that I’m about to give the entire feature-length soundtrack away for free. I’m working on the post production right now, and will soon have a special page set up for it, where you can download the entire score. If that isn’t reason to buy the film and support our efforts (all donated for the love of Turkish cinema, by the way), I dunno what is. Way I see it is, you buy the film, watch it with your friends on “movie night”, and then come back and download the score. What could be more awesome than that?

Go forth and conquer, for your nation and your country! (And right now your country is Türkiye).

Blockparty 2009 Writeup

So. I’ve returned from Blockparty, which is a shining example of the collection of nerds, coders, musicians, artists, photographers, and hardware hackers otherwise known as a demoparty. Each year, sceners get together at the Notacon hacker convention in Cleveland, cram into a big room, and work on the productions that we eventually submit to various competitions. These include Demos (oldschool and newschool), Music (oldschool and newschool), a Wildcard competition where anything goes, and so on.

Turns out I won first place in both Music compos (Regular Music: Lorem Ipsum and Oldschool Music: Micro Media Broth), which shocked me because the competition consisted of #mod_shrine, some of the most talented trackers and demoscene musicians active today. Really fun guys to hang out with, too.

I also won the main demo competition, as the musical half of a collaboration between my group (Brainstorm) and my friends The Northern Dragons. They needed help with music for their entry at the last minute, so I wrote them a piece on site, and we took first place. Part of the prize for winning was ..the actual computer on which the demos were displayed — a $1000 gaming rig — and the Dragons insisted that I take it home! I was shocked, and utterly honored to have worked with such talented and generous guys.

Lastly, I also made music on site for a cell phone demo by my friend nrr, an unbelievable first foray into the (horrifyingly frustrating) world of MIDP Java hackery. I’m completely amazed that he was able to learn the toolkit, write effects, and put together a demo in basically under a day. This is a prime example of demo scene brilliance at work. And it got 4th place out of 9 entries, holy hell! Just insane.

In between competitions, I played an impromptu chiptune set, and you can see video of it here. You never can tell how a crowd will react to chip music, but these were straight up nerds, and were 100% rocking the hell out to Nintendo music. Even (especially) the Fat Man was jumping around, which my brain is still only beginning to process.

Anyone who’s into music, programming, or art, or wants to become involved in any of them, please join our scene full of crazy geniuses. Drop me a line and I’ll fill you in, tell you where to find stuff, and gush about Blockparty, which is, for my money, the most enjoyable demoparty in North America.

Oh yeah, also. I freaking drove both ways with NECROS AND TRIXTER. Necros tracked in my car, and Trixter coded in my car. You have no idea how close I came to swerving off the road, because it blew my mind. We had a moving demo party. NECROS WAS TRACKING. IN MY CAR. If you had told me ten years ago that this would occur, I would have laughed at you.

Onward to 2010!

Also, Turkish Rambo is out tomorrow. Check back.

Lorem Ipsum

I wrote this as my entry for Blockparty 2009’s Music competition, in which it won first place. It’s supposed to be a “placeholder” theme song for a futuristic anime series with a sort of apocalyptic vibe. This is my first released song using Yamaha’s VOCALOID2 software, and also my first “singing choir” using Quantum Leap Symphonic Choirs, which I bought in 2006 but still hadn’t really explored. It’s incredible, as you can hear. The lyrics are also available. For anyone who doesn’t know what “Lorem Ipsum” means, read this for an explanation!

Micro Media Broth

This is the first new NES chiptune from me in quite a while — this won first place in the Oldschool Music competition at Blockparty 2009. If you’re a fan of my chiptunes, you probably want to hear this. Additionally, and this is kind of a big deal, the IT version contains… all of my FX3 samples. I’m giving them away to the community. You’re free to use them in anything. Enjoy!

Sans Titre (Northern Dragons + Brainstorm)

My soundtrack for the conceptual demo, Sans Titre. I wrote this on site at Blockparty (using Ableton and Reason) after my friends, the Northern Dragons, asked me to help bail them out since their usual musician didn’t have a track ready. I had to write this while techno music blared in the background (it was a ..very noisy event). The demo itself can be found on Pouet here.