Mike Clarke is one of those computer musicians, who grew up with C-64 and Amiga computers. He started with composing commercial music very early. I think he was about 14 years old, when he did the song Little Puff in Dragonland for Codemasters, a funny chip tune which I really like. It really surprised me when Mike told me, that he think this song is awful. "I suppose it's okay melodically but it's just SO annoying. It honestly took me about 30 minutes to write and I got paid a massive XXX for it. That was nearly 10 years ago (!) when I was doing Last Ninja 2", he said back in early 1999.
During the following years he composed a massive amount of music for various Amiga games, especially for Psygnosis. Bill'S Tomato Game, Globdule, Brian the Lion or Theatre of Death are such games. For Ocean he did the music for Last Action Hero. Various console projects (Formula 1, Krazy Ivan) are also on his "jobs of the past" list, as multi-platform games like Microcosm or Wipeout.
He worked for 7,5 years at Psygnosis, before he was a freelancer for one year and a half. Then he became a full-time audio programmer for two years, and now he's working for Sensaura designing Sound Designer tools and presenting GameCODA cross-platform audio middleware. His other music job is playing in a band. Together with his friend Dave Parkinson he founded the band From Within.
As all other musicians, Mike worked on a couple of Amiga projects, which have never been finished, due to various reasons. Luckily he never lost the music files for these games. Thanks to him, we can offer you these tunes now. Mike wants to say a few things about these games:
G2 Amiga Music:
This music was created for the game G2 (or Operation G2) for the Amiga, which was to be released by Psygnosis. You'll find all the ideas I put down.
G2 - Tensev1 was the first one I did but the programmers didn't like it, so I modified a few bits and did G2 - Tensev2 (which is essentially the same but with some different sections). It turned out they wanted something more atmospheric so I did G2 - Title2V1 (I started it on my Korg O1/W and then samples the sounds and converted it to Protracker). There are 2 other edits of it (v2 and v22), but the game was canned before I finished a complete version.
The tense version starts off a bit in-your-face, but there are some really really nice bits in there later on, which I keep meaning to use in a new tune some time. I retain all copyright so no ripping them off before me. At the time of writing only about 5 people have ever heard these tunes.
SuperHero Amiga music (and sound effects):
SuperHero was a game in development by Tiertex for Psygnosis. It was a scrolling beat 'em up affair where you could design your own superhero character. Tehnically, it looked a bit like some SNES games of the time, but the game got canned because it wasn't very playable and never changed after months of development. As far as I remember anyway.
These modules were created sometime around 1992. Thanks to the genius of Commodore not including a battery-backed up clock in the lesser Amigas, there is no correct datestamp on any files.
The original music (with "Old" prefixed to the filenames) was created by Ray Norrish, but the programmers wanted the main in-game music to be in three channels instead of four. I first re-made the title screen music by re-making all the instruments. Some of the originals are very low quality with very inefficient loops, so I fixed the loops giving myself more space and replaced some with better quality ones. I also re-wrote little bits of the music to improve it.
The in-game stuff was a bit of a nightmare. I tried to convert as much as I could into three channels, but for some of the tunes this was impossible because afterwards it sounded appalling. For those awkward ones, I just wrote a new one from scratch.
There were also end-of-level baddy tunes. These, again, had been done in four channels, but the programmers wanted them in two instead! This was so that the player could have a channel for sound effects and the baddy could have a channel. Overkill if you ask me. Anyway, the original tunes were *impossible* to convert. If you hear them and look at them in a tracker, you'll understand why. So I re-made the whole lot from scratch and had to add a load of new ones as well. They are embedded as subsongs inside the main tunes. Again, load them into a tracker and have a look. The baddy tunes have got almost no space in them as I tried to pack as much sound as I could into two channels to stop it from sounding too thin (you find that a lot with the three channel stuff as well).
The sound effects were mostly already done, apart from the ones with MC at the beginning of the filenames. They are mostly 8-bit signed raw data.
At the same time as writing these, I also had to write a sound effects driver (got it into 982 bytes with synthesis!) and create sound effects for Amiga Wiz'N'Liz, do music for Theatre Of Death, Dracula (Mega-CD), Lemmings 2 (SNES), the intro for Combat Air Patrol, and many other bits and pieces. Basically I did something for pretty much everything that came out of Psygnosis at that time, even designing levels for Hired Guns and Globdule and drawing the title screens for Lynx Lemmings! It was a nightmare and my pay was terrible (£7 000 at that time, then went up to £12 000 a while later), but I was naive and "happy" to be writing music for games.
Hope you enjoy this little piece of Psygnosis (and my) history.
Mike Clarke, June 2003, From Within. | 
Mike Clarke
Bill's Tomato Game Title Tune
Globdule Title
Last Ninja 2 Loader
Last Ninja 2 Song 6
Little Puff in Dragonland
Theatre of Death Title |