About
My name is Jacob, but please call me Jake. I release music as virt.
I have made music and sound effects for video games ranging from Game Boy Color to Xbox 360, and for any film studios that really need to sound like they’re from the 80s. A few years back, I achieved my lifelong dream of writing music for official Contra and TMNT games, so I had to come up with a NEW dream, and that is to buy a house for my wife Kristi, and a big back yard for Nugget the hilarious puggle.
Like quite a few others working in the game industry — and most porn stars — I started out in various amateur “scenes”. Despite crazy work schedules, my passion for hobbyist work remains strong, because it’s stupid fun and keeps my skills sharp. To this day, I hatch schemes with friends in the demo scene, chiptune, and fan remix communities. I try to give back by encouraging younger artists to be excellent to each other.
I spend a disturbing amount of time writing music for outdated game consoles, typically in ways which force the composer to craft every bit of expression through deliberate instructions. Attempting to capture the nuance of live instrumentation is really hard even with high-end synthesizers, let alone cheap ones soldered into toys from 1982. Where some might see these limitations as a bar to creativity, my favorite chip artists past and present treat them like a high-flying trapeze, making all the crazy flips look effortless. The ideal chiptune brings the sound out of the realm of kitschy retro bleepy 8-bit irony, and stands on its own as legitimately cool music.
Feel free to email me anytime to say hi; I promise I’ll read it. I may or may not respond right away, and I apologize in advance. I tend to focus on the task at hand to the exclusion of everything else for 16 hour stretches, so I’m inhumanly productive and annoyingly hard to reach. Don’t be afraid to pester me. Some day I’ll hire a secretary, and I am extremely excited about that because it means I get to write downtempo jams for when the secretary puts you on hold.
“Big Lion” is the name of my home studio. It is derived from The Discovery Channel’s “Into the Lion’s Den“, a show Kristi and I watched one night. The majority of the show involved the host approaching and retreating from the lions, while singing two phrases over and over : “BIIIIIIIIIIIG LION!!” and “BACKING AWAAAAY!!“. This served to announce his presence and intentions, so the lions would not get startled and tear his face off.
Needless to say, these phrases have become commonplace in the Kaufman household. Nugget is amused by the mere suggestion that we could ever successfully sneak up on him. He would like to see us try.