Difference between revisions of "Mark Cooksey"
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Revision as of 15:53, 30 March 2014
Mark Thomas William Cooksey | ||||||||||
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Mark Cooksey is a British composer who has been working on video game music ever since the 1980's 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 almost all of Elite's games. In 1986, Mark left Elite but then later joined again 1989 and then he left again in 1990. While working at Elite, he moved on to their division MotiveTime, which paid their employees bonuses for based on Elite's profits. However, the bonuses gradually got lower and eventually disappeared. He later worked for NMS Software, which was a bunch of former Elite staff members. Mark also worked for Arc Developments and created the sound engines there. Mark's best known soundtracks are for Commodore 64 ports of 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.
Contents
Music Composition
C64
As stated above, Mark used an assembly player from his Oric Atmos computer.
GB
Mark composed his music on Notator for the Atari ST and wrote a tool that converted the MIDI files to his sound driver.
GEN
Mark composed MIDI files which were converted to his 68000 sound driver. Mark said he had a very difficult time programming instruments on it and had Sega send him some example instruments.
GG/SMS
Mark wrote the music in Logic and Notator for the Atari ST. He would then convert his MIDI files to the GameGear and Master System using his own conversion tool and sound engine.
NES
All of Mark's NES music was composed in Notator for the Atari ST. He then converted the MIDI files in Notator to the NES. Mark also programmed his own sound driver for the NES. According to Mark, he was primarily trying to get "flutey" sounds out of the NES. His music was played back from a memory box from Spidersoft.
The game Joe & Mac uses digitized drum samples, which Mark says may have been supplied by Richard Frankish.