David Rippy

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David Rippy
David Rippy.jpg
Born 1968
Birth Place Decatur, Georgia
Nationality American   USA.svg
Aliases Ripman

David Rippy was born in 1968 in Decatur, Georgia. He attended Klein Oakland High School and graduated in 1986. His favorite subject in school was computer math and he attended Texas A&M after his high school graduation. In 1990 he eventually graduated.

He originally joined Ensemble Studios in 1994 before they were focused on games, instead they were a consultation firm called Ensemble Corporation. At the time he joined the company there were only five employees working for the company.

In 1995, the president of Ensemble Corporation, Tony Goodman, was getting tired of the consultation business and was looking for a way out. Game development was picked up as a side project at the company, being worked on during the evenings, and David Rippy ended up being the person responsible for music. Working both consulting and composing music ended up being quite tiresome and as such, he enlisted the help of his younger brother Stephen Rippy who was still in college at the time.

Together they worked on the music for the first game released by the company, Age of Empires (W32) sharing the workload on equal basis. After this though, the role David Rippy had in the company shifted and he ended getting more responsibilities in the game design itself, and as such didn't have as much time to compose music.

He still composed some music for both the expansion pack and the sequel, but he didn't have time to fully complete the tracks and as such Stephen Rippy added some finishing touches to all of them. After this though, he completely dropped music composing and instead focused on his primary job, game design.

After Ensemble Studios closed down in 2009, he founded Bonfire Studios. It became one of the many companies founded after the old development studio was closed down and many former employees ended up working there. Bonfire Studios eventually got aborbed into Zynga.

Currently he resides in Allen, Texas.

Music Composition

The pieces of equipment David Rippy used during his composition work was a Boss DSS-330 synthesizer and an E-mu ESI-32 sampler. Sound editing and mixing was done using SoundForge. When any MIDI work was needed, he used Cakewalk.

Gameography

Released Title Sample
1997-10-15 Age of Empires (W32)
1998-10-31 Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome (W32)
1999-09-30 Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (W32)

Picture Gallery

Links