GamesArt interview — Jeroen Tel (2015)

The Tel Me More-era interview: why he crowdfunded remakes of his 1987–1991 C64 work, where the funk in his basslines comes from, and his first game credit named — Hawkeye.

Key claims#

• On the driver, 2015 wording: "the first tunes were written by me in BASIC when I was about 11/12 years young. Later on I hacked into some machine codes music routines and composed music in it. Not much later I came into contact with Charles Deenen, who wrote a simple music routine and together we expanded it to meet my music (effects) needs. I wrote a bunch of demo tunes using the routine (directly coded in assembler) and together we went to the (back then) largest game developers conference in the world and we instantly got hired" (musicfile, sid-player-routine).
• First game music: "The first game music I wrote was composed for the game Hawkeye, at the age of 14/15." (He was 14/15 in 1986–87; Hawkeye shipped August 1988 — VGMPF's gameography has Battle Valley released first, February 1988.)
• Why remake: "Remember back in 1987-1991… It was very hard to create rich sounding music with only three C64 SID (sound chip) voices… To quote Rob Hubbard: 'It was like making music with boxing gloves on'. Now … I can finally work out the fantasies I had back then"; fans kept asking for a crowdfunding campaign. "The crispy sound of the SID chip will never get boring to me."
• Platform list (his own): C64, Amiga, NES, SNES, Master System/Game Gear, Genesis/Megadrive, Game Boy/Color/Advance, 3DO, Saturn, PC, Xbox, PlayStation, plus plug-and-play TV games.
• The Mortal Kombat anecdote: converting the arcade music by ear to a plug-and-play joystick game in two weeks after several other composers had given up; Dan Forden had no data left, so Tel transcribed "every notes / chords / percussion / drums … from scratch by ear"; he later learned the project (worth $1.5 M to the developer) would have been cancelled without him.
• Influences: classical at home (piano and flute lessons from his parents, the Monday-night choir); Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe (1978) "an absolute masterpiece"; Doe Maar; Michael Jackson's Thriller; Level 42's "Hot Water" triggered me and my brother to dig into playing funk/slap bass, which is a noticeable influence in the music I produce even today; C64 influences Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, "a little later also Tim Follin".
• 2015 next steps: the pop act "Tess & Tel" with Tess Fries ("Pixel Pop", "a mixture of retro 8-bit music and more modern electronic styles"); music and sound design for the racing game Pixel Racing.
• Also: games as "maybe even the highest form of art" (interactivity argument); music/SFX "really makes 50% of the experience"; dream projects GTA5 (audio direction) and Minecraft (solo scope); a year of 8-hours-a-day Half-Life multiplayer with his brother.

Notable quotes#

"To quote Rob Hubbard: 'It was like making music with boxing gloves on'."

"Level 42 with their song 'Hot Water' triggered me and my brother to dig into playing funk/slap bass."

Relevance to the wiki#

Dates and motivates the Tel Me More campaign already noted on jeroen-tel from SIDin #15, adds the slap-bass origin of the funky MoN basslines, and gives the 2015 version of the driver story ("a simple music routine … expanded together") to weigh beside Deenen's "the driver that I wrote".

Pages touched#

jeroen-tel · charles-deenen · maniacs-of-noise · musicfile · rob-hubbard · martin-galway