Mark Cooksey
Mark Cooksey | ||||||||||
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Mark Cooksey is a British composer who worked on audio for games and is one of the better known game musicians. Mark graduated college with a degree in science and was looking for a job. He saw an ad for Elite looking for a programmer and it interested him so he went to apply for the job in 1985. The boss of Elite, Brian Wilcox, asked Mark to write him a 6502 assembly player on Mark's Oric Atmos computer. After he did that, Wilcox asked Cooksey to write a tune to their game Airwolf using the assembly player Mark wrote for him. After he did, he was given the job as an audio engineer which Mark did not expect. From that point on he composed music for all of Elite's games. In 1986, Mark left Elite but then later joined again 1989 and then he left again in 1990. He later worked for NMS software, which was a bunch of former Elite staff members. Mark's best known soundtracks are for Commodore 64 ports of Mighty Bomb Jack, Paperboy, and Ghosts and Goblins, which have had tons of remixes by C64 music fans alike. Mark continues to compose game soundtracks to this day and he even plays in a band. Mark says that writing music for video games inspired him to compose and play music.
Music Composition
C64
As stated above, Mark used an assembly player from his Oric Atmos computer.
NES
Adventures of Dr. Franken, Aladdin, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jimmy Connors Tennis, and Prince of Persia were composed as MIDI files in C-Lab Notator for the Atari ST. Cliffhanger and Dragon's Lair were composed in hex code. His music was played back from a memory box from Spidersoft.