MATT FURNISS
While the 8-bit era featured its own selection of tunesmiths – most notably Martin Galway, Ben Daglish, Rob Hubbard, Tim Follin and David Whittaker – it wasn’t until the late-Eighties and the rise of the 16-bit machines that composers were really let loose with their keyboards and imaginations. When the Sony PlayStation and CD-ROM became the new storage medium in the mid-Nineties, every facet of games development changed considerably, not least the audio that could now be levelled up to include arrangements and compositions that completely mirrored their real-life counterparts. From his early days at Teque Software in Rotherham to working at The House Of Mouse, this is Matt Furniss, In The Chair.
Were you musical as a kid growing up?
Oh yes. At home we owned one of those ubiquitous wood framed organs with bass pedals and a rhythm box. I could read basic music notation and play a few tunes on it and I’d perform Christmas carols at the school nativity show. I could also play simple things on the piano and enjoyed listening to electronic music such as Jean-Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk. I became more interested in synthesisers and eventually upgraded to a Yamaha SY77 workstation.
Presumably videogames were a parallel love for you?
Absolutely. Growing up it was all about the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 and there were very few games consoles around. Like most of my pals, I had a Spectrum – the C64 was only for rich kids! Earlier, like many families in the Seventies, we had a TV game. Very boring. Fortunately, I could rent an Atari 2600 or Mattel Intellivision with games from the local video shop, which I’d do as often as possible! Then, when the ZX81 was released, I got one of those. My dad would take me to a computer club run by British Telecom engineers where I got copies of ZX81 games such as and . Not exactly the full arcade experience, but passable if you squint and use your imagination.
