Maniacs of Noise

The Dutch music group founded by jeroen-tel and charles-deenen, who met "at computer meetings in Venlo"; the name was thought up by the two of them, and their first shared player routine was "our first MoN routine" (sid-player-routine; sources: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel, s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews). Only what the two Tel interviews say is recorded here.

Facts#

• Division of labour at the start: Deenen programmed and made sound effects, Tel composed; both worked from home; later each did the other's job too. It ended as a two-man company when Deenen was asked in-house at Interplay and Tel took a job at Probe Software in England (around 1991); 64'er wrote in 3/91 that Tel "decided to become a solo artist" (source: s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews).
• CDs under the name (as of 1997): Vivid Video – Music For Home Video; Maniacs of Noise – Original Video Game Sound Effects (284 effects, used by BBC, NBC, Discovery and RTL4); Maniacs of Noise – The Video Game Soundmakers (1993, studio versions of Nintendo and Sega game tracks plus originals, sold through Nintendo in the Netherlands and Belgium); the 1992 CD single X-Mess-House. Website then: home.worldonline.nl/~mon (source: s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews).
• In 2014 the group "is about making music for fun": every member free to do what he wants, plus co-op tunes between members "from all over the world". Members besides Tel: Thomas Egeskov Petersen (Laxity, Denmark), Thomas Mogensen (DRAX, Denmark), Mick Rippon (Mickrip, Australia), Jogeir Liljedahl (Norway), Geir Tjelta (Norway), Søren Lund (Jeff, Denmark), Rod Thacker (Canada), Barry Leitch (USA). Tel had "an option on the London Symphony Orchestra" to play MoN music via Kickstarter, and liked the idea of an all-star music disk (source: s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel). Hugi's headline spells it "Maniacs of Noice".
• Tel's unreleased C64 tunes of 1986–1997 were to appear in a demo called "Noise Of Maniacs" (source: s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews).

Founding, driver, business and roster (VGMPF and Deenen)#

• Founding: 1987, by Deenen, Tel and Marcel Donné; Deenen and Donné met at the monthly Venlo meetings, Deenen went to school in Tel's town; all three had arranged in soundmonitor. In September 1987 Deenen and Tel went to the PCW show at Earl's Court, made up "a lot of catchy names" in the hotel room, and hewson gave them Battle Valley — "our first paid gig" (sources: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise, s-charles-deenen-interviews).
• The driver: "Deenen programmed a music driver ('Musicfile') and a sound effects driver in Turbo Ass. Deenen, Donné, Tel and Ouwehand arranged by typing hexadecimal numbers and labels into the driver's source code" — see musicfile and turbo-assembler; the Cybernoid II source survives (sources: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise, s-realdmx-sid-players, s-cybernoid-behind-the-notes). Johannes Bjerregaard and Laxity used their own drivers; the driver was officially converted to the Spectrum 128K (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).
• Business: Deenen ran it from home and did sound design, "preferring to leave composing and arranging music to everyone else", but orders forced him to compose too; "Per game, MoN took two to six days and got £100 to £1000"; Deenen in 1998: "Between 1985 and 1991 … audio for over 200 C64, Amiga and Atari St games", in 2010 "over a hundred games" with "5 people making musical noise at once" at the peak; trademark claimed December 1988, registry number 1991 (sources: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise, s-charles-deenen-interviews).
• Roster with dates (VGMPF/C64-Wiki): Deenen Sept 1987–late 1990/91; Tel Sept 1987–1990 and 1992/93–present; Donné Sept 1987–1988/89; Bjerregaard from Oct 1988; reyn-ouwehand late 1989?–1990 (to system-3 by 1990-05-12); Thomas Petersen (Laxity) from Dec 1989/early 1990; Vibrants (JCH, Klaus Grøngaard) and Amok freelance 1989–90; Frederic Hahn c. 1989; Kim Christensen late 1989; Øistein Eide, Jussi Pietila, Tor Gausen, Martin Wall, Robert Österbergh 1990–91; Thomas Mogensen (DRAX) from 1996; later Geir Tjelta (2009), Søren Lund/Jeff (2013), Markus Klein/LMan (2017), Jochen Feldkötter/Virgill (2018), Dávid Halmi/Nagz (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).
• The 1990 split: Tel left between 1990-03-28 and 1990-06-23 (diskmags reported mutual resentment; 64'er 3/91 said he wanted to be independent); Deenen was offered a US job by October 1990 and left Eide in charge; Tel returned 1992/93 (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise). matt-gray dates their arrival at System 3 to around March 1989: "I think the Maniacs of Noise had rolled into town by then!" (source: s-c64com-matt-gray-interview).
• C64 gameography (VGMPF dates): Battle Valley 1988-02, Starball, Scout, cybernoid 1988-03, Hawkeye 1988-08, Scorpion, cybernoid-ii 1988-10, Savage, Double Dragon 1988-11, Eliminator, Tomcat, Combat Crazy, Zamzara, Stormlord 1989, dominator 1989-07, Turbo Outrun 1989-11, Flimbo's Quest 1990-02, Vendetta, BAT 1990-12, plus many unreleased titles (source: s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise).

The scene's account#

• SIDwave: TMC (charles-deenen) "codes the first MON (Maniacs of Noise) player. It's a clone of Rob Hubbard's players. Let's make it clear, most later used players are. It's no direct rip, but they all have the same structure"; "When TMC and Jeroen Tel entered the world of music in games, they take it by storm. The scene goes nuts and proclaims them as the best musicians ever!"; the 1988 future-composer "is the first TMC/MON player, but Finnish Gold had made an editor for it"; a dispute with Soedesoft over who had "the MON sound" first — "The MON sound is from TMC and JT" (source: s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid).
• From the other side: matt-gray — "System 3 effectively dropped me in favour of Maniacs Of Noise, who by the way I thought were very good" (source: s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview); Chris Abbott calls them "the new darlings of game music" when reyn-ouwehand rescored Ninja Remix in the MoN driver (source: s-remix64-ninja-remix). Abbott's own 2003 interview says nothing further about the group — what it does document, the remix economy that kept this music in print after 1997, is on chris-abbott (source: s-sidin04-abbott-interview).
• SIDId files the group's players as MoN/Deenen (variants Cyb2, TTWII, JTS, RWE, Bantam, Deenen_Digi), MoN/Bjerregaard and MoN/FutureComposer — "Charles Deenen made the player & Juha Granberg (FCS) made the editor" (source: s-sidid-player-list; sidid).

In the sources (2026-08-30)#

• A MoN job sheet survives in Bjerregaard's James Bond 3 header: received 18/6, latest delivery 19/6, "30 SECS OF JAMES BOND TITLE TUNE INCLUDING A DEMO OF THE MANIACS OF NOISE MUSIC STYLE" — a one-day commission whose brief is the style (source: s-realdmx-bjerregaard-player).
• "Scoop Designs L.T.D. in 1989" appears in Armada's MUSICFILE banner ("Special version for :Reyn Ouwehand"), in a text string "music by reyn ouwehand from scoop designs", and as "(C) Scoop designs ltd. / m.o.n." on Deenen's second player — Deenen's scene handle was "TMC/Scoop"; the files do not say what Scoop Designs was — the interviews do: see scoop-designs (sources: s-realdmx-ouwehand-mon-tunes, s-realdmx-deenen-test-tunes).
• The driver's generations: MUSICFILE (1988, Cybernoid II, test tune, Armada) → the 1990 rewrite of Dutch Breeze (intro + loop sequences, legato, segment filters, looping drums) and, beside them, the "Scoop" statement-language player (source: s-realdmx-ouwehand-mon-tunes, s-realdmx-deenen-test-tunes; all on musicfile).

• sidin in February 2007 introduced laxity as "a member of Vibrants and Maniacs of Noise groups" who had "recently started to compose again with sid" — by then a game programmer near Aarhus writing his tenth C64 driver and the SID Factory editor (source: s-sidin11-laxity-interview). richard-bayliss, in July 2006, named "Drax/MON" first among "the best scene musicians of today" and Tel's 1988–1990 game tunes among his favourites (source: s-sidin10-bayliss-interview).

The 1989 profile, and later first-hand additions#

• C=Lehti 4/89, the wiki's only contemporary profile: MoN grew out of scoop-designs' demos; TMC, bored of demo coding, mailed a disk of demos to English software houses and hewson — short of music at the time — phoned the next day; Battle Valley was the first published music; Marcel Donné was later dropped for not inspiring good enough melodies. In early 1989: about 60 compositions; the routine at "version 78" (as the OCR reads) with a complete two-channel digi playback; composing "entirely without an editor" — notes typed as numbers on Tel's home PC and cross-assembled to the C64; plans for a London office; MoN "no longer just a group but a company" that also arranged other people's compositions into its fast routines for software houses; an Amiga routine finished (rumoured in Iron Lord); preliminary record plans with Virgin Records (source: s-c-lehti-maniacs-of-noise). The retrospective accounts (Deenen 2010, VGMPF) instead have Battle Valley commissioned at the September 1987 PCW show — kept as an attributed disagreement.
• Deenen's 2010 credit list splits the labour title by title: "Sound effects" on the Tel classics (cybernoid, cybernoid-ii, Eliminator, Myth, Rubicon, Savage, Turbo Outrun …), music of his own mostly on later imports and conversions; $200–1000 and two to six days per game, sometimes inside "six to eight kilobyte of memory for music and sound effects" (source: s-c64com-charles-deenen-interview).
• Freelance overflow, from the freelancer's side: JCH of Vibrants was turned down by charles-deenen on a first sending and taken on after a second; the one job that reached him was Chase HQ II / Special Criminal Investigation, where Link composed and JCH multiplexed two voices of sound effects against two of music — the concrete shape of the "Vibrants … freelance 1989–90" line in the roster above (source: s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles).
• Still the reference catalogue in 2008: hermit names Tel "one of the very-best composers in the world", live-remixes his tunes with a band in Hungary, and reels off Rubicon, Wiz, Aspar Grand Prix, Myth, Poseidon, Supremacy, Golden Axe, Eliminator, Cybernoid I and II and Savage — listing reyn-ouwehand, DRAX and laxity as the group's other members (source: s-sidin12-hermit-interview).
• Tel in 1994: EA's in-house offer at fourteen declined; the Video Game Soundmakers CD orderable for DFL 40 from the MoN studio in Helmond (source: s-domination01-jeroen-tel-interview). In 1996: "MANIACS OF NOISE is now actually still my company!" (source: s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview). In 2015 MoN's work included the by-ear Mortal Kombat plug-and-play conversion, done in two weeks (source: s-gamesart-jeroen-tel-interview).

Related#

jeroen-tel · charles-deenen · sid · sid-player-routine · chordian · chris-abbott

Sources#

s-sidmusic-jeroen-tel-interviews · s-hugi38-interview-jeroen-tel · s-vgmpf-maniacs-of-noise · s-charles-deenen-interviews · s-realdmx-sid-players · s-c64com-matt-gray-interview · s-cybernoid-behind-the-notes · s-recollection-brief-history-of-sid · s-vandalism63-matt-gray-interview · s-remix64-ninja-remix · s-sidid-player-list · s-realdmx-bjerregaard-player · s-realdmx-ouwehand-mon-tunes · s-realdmx-deenen-test-tunes · s-sidin11-laxity-interview · s-sidin10-bayliss-interview · s-c-lehti-maniacs-of-noise · s-c64com-charles-deenen-interview · s-domination01-jeroen-tel-interview · s-imr-jeroen-tel-interview · s-gamesart-jeroen-tel-interview · s-chordian-my-computer-chronicles · s-sidin12-hermit-interview · s-sidin04-abbott-interview