Charles Deenen interviews: Domination #11 (1998) and Designing Sound (2010)

charles-deenen in his own words — the programmer half of maniacs-of-noise on the driver, the tool and the money, and later the sound designer looking back at how it started.

Key claims#

Domination #11 (Jazzcat, 1998)

• "Between 1985 and 1991, I had a company named Maniacs of Noise with Jeroen Tel. We did (together with several other people that worked for Maniacs of Noise) audio for over 200 C64, Amiga and Atari St games." He no longer owned a C64 and could not list them.
• Asked whether he coded his own editor: "Jeroen Tel used the Maniacs Of Noise driver that I wrote for several years. He only started to write his own after I left to the states. The editor for both of us was easy: Turbo Assembler :) I've coded my own driver for several platforms: C64, Amiga, Atari St, Nes, Snes … I helped out designing the drivers for the Playstation and PC over here at Interplay." (musicfile, turbo-assembler, sid-player-routine)
• Started in BASIC on a PET in 1982 at 12; quit school at 16 to do audio full time for C64, Amiga and Atari; at 20 a freelance piece for Interplay's Dragon Wars led to a full-time offer and the move to the USA nine months later; by 1998 audio director at Interplay with ten people, also film sound design.
• Per SID: "Time: 2 days. Longest tune: 7 minutes. Personal favourite: none." Paid "between 100 to 1000 pounds" per game; money mattered "since I had to live on it".
• Favourite C64 musicians "Rob + Martin" (rob-hubbard, martin-galway); C64 programmer Mario van Zeist; graphician Bob Stevenson. On study: "Jazz will always be the hardest. BUT, some people have a really hard time getting the feel of a dance tune down, so that might also be a good thing to study." On ego: "I'll never say that my music is good, because it simply isn't." No urge to return to the C64. Greetings to "Tjarda, Jeroen, Johannes, Oistein".

Designing Sound (Isaza, 2010)

• "Around 1983, attempted to start doing audio on a computer. That was the era of Commodore PET, so I tried to get tolerable sound out of a single-beep CBM-PET … Soon after acquiring a C64, I started to make music/graphic demos, through which I met Jeroen Tel. We wanted to make our own music, and wrote a music-driver for the Commodore 64." The "odd idea" of making money "just enough to pay for some gum and floppy-disks"; the London show where hewson "gave us our first paid gig".
• "Initially, I mainly provided the sound-effects for the titles which we did, but soon had to delve into doing music. Well, I knew nothing about music. I knew that a C major sounded OK after a D minor, that's about it, LOL. However, funny enough the first music pieced I did wasn't bad."
• Late 1980s: sub-contracting, "at its peak had 5 people making musical noise at once"; music and/or SFX "for over a hundred games on Commodore 64, 128, Amiga, Atari ST and Spectrum"; game teams were 3–4 people, Zzap!64 "about the only magazine dedicated to gaming".
• 1990 Dragon's War for Interplay → move to Irvine mid-1991, first McKids (NES) for Virgin, then ten years at Interplay (Star Trek, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Descent); film trailers since 2001; EA Black Box (Vancouver) since 2003 for Need for Speed.
• What he values in sound designers: will-power (three days locked in a room to make one Descent ship fly-by), real-world listening, mentors, and "musical understanding, musical sensability, and rhythmic sense".

Notable quotes#

"Jeroen Tel used the Maniacs Of Noise driver that I wrote for several years. He only started to write his own after I left to the states. The editor for both of us was easy: Turbo Assembler."

"I knew that a C major sounded OK after a D minor, that's about it."

Relevance to the wiki#

Settles who wrote the MoN driver and what the "editor" was, gives the per-tune time and fee, and supplies Deenen's own biography for charles-deenen and maniacs-of-noise; the NES/Interplay years are outside the wiki's focus.

Pages touched#

charles-deenen · maniacs-of-noise · jeroen-tel · musicfile · turbo-assembler · hewson · sid-player-routine · rob-hubbard · martin-galway