Arcade Attack — Matt Gray (VGM Maestro) interview (2020/2021)

A short late interview with matt-gray: the Last Ninja 2 brief in one sentence, the NES port of his player, and the three Reformation albums.

Key claims#

• Bangkok Knights → system-3: Hubbard "was leaving to go to EA in the States", System 3 "needed a loading track in just a few days", and "within the hour were offering me the in-house musician's job". For last-ninja-2: "I knew the LN1 soundtrack reasonably well and I wanted to do more of a departure from that as the follow-up was set in New York. So whilst I did some Far Eastern style nods to the first game I mainly went for electronic rock soundtrack type pieces."
• NES: "I'd already adapted my C64 player to work on the NES for the Treasure Island Dizzy port. But the NES had a very different sound to the 64's SID chip so it wasn't always straightforward"; the Micro Machines riff is "an arpeggiated keyboard riff I'd always messed around with on the keys or piano" (matt-gray-player).
• Reformation: suggested by Chris Abbott in 2013, crowdfunded in late 2014 "and funded the same day"; Reformation 2 (2018), Reformation 3 (2020), "over 50 tracks on R1 and 25 for R2", a few Amiga tracks on R3.
• Entry: Compunet — "software developers were using it to find coders, artists and musicians"; Dalali (Mean Streak, Yogi Bear), then Codemasters and Thalamus, full-time "within 6 months or so".
• Pace and habits: worked at night, "very much a case of experimenting with sounds but it could be a pain waiting for code compiles to hear the results. Working on lengthy tracks could also be tiring because you'd often have to listen from the top every time"; "several days to start and finish a track" then, "4 or 5 tracks a week" now (tracking-workflow).
• Freedom: "On the 64 I had a lot of freedom really to do what I wanted"; proudest: LN2, "sold the most copies and has endured with the fans the longest"; unreleased: C64 versions of Afterburner and Outrun.

Relevance to the wiki#

Small confirmations for matt-gray, last-ninja-2 and the NES adaptation of the matt-gray-player; the compile-and-listen loop as a period detail for tracking-workflow.

Pages touched#

matt-gray · matt-gray-player · last-ninja-2 · system-3 · compunet · tracking-workflow