Brad Fuller
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Bradley Allen Fuller was born on November 5, 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is known for his several audio contributions to Atari.
Brad Fuller had been composing music and sound effects for the game industry since 1978. He was in an Atari 800 computer group in Indianapolis. When one of his friends in the group joined Atari, they were looking for composers. As a result, he joined the coin-op division of Atari in 1982 during their peak performance as the Director of audio. He not only composed music for several games, but also oversaw the music and sound effects of every game the company developed. Brad also had the honor of composing the music to Marble Madness, the first arcade game to use an FM sound chip. In 1993 he was promoted to the Director of Engineering which he held for three years before leaving the company in 1996.
After Atari, Fuller became a partner at Matter to Magic Studios from 1996 to 1998. From 1998 to 1999 he worked as the software manager at Digital TV. From 1999 to 2002 he was the Director of Product Management at OpenTV. In 2003, Fuller co-founded the company Sonaural Audio Studios where he worked at until his death. The company developed audio and audio software for the game industry.
Fuller had an impressive educational background having attended the Berklee College of Music and Indiana University of Bloomington. He also had an MS in Technology Management from Pepperdine University.
Although most of the music he was known for involves computers, for more conventional music, Fuller played the string bass.
Unfortunately on the morning of January 2, 2016, Brad Fuller passed away from pancreatic cancer. His contributions to the video game industry and Atari will always be remembered.
Audio Development
ARC
Brad used RPM, in which music was written in Music Macro Language. When he was finished with the song, he'd feed the data into a mainframe computer. The data would compile for around 10-15 minutes before he could hear the music, and if any mistakes were made in the music, he would have to go back and fix his mistakes and repeat the process. This made it a very arduous task.
Atari later developed the CAGE audio system, in which Brad converted the RPM language to use in CAGE. The name stood for Configurable Audio Generation Engine. It was also named after the Atari developer John Cage, who died during the development of T-Mek, the first game to use this sound engine. It used four different speakers. Chuck Peplinski created the audio and synthesizer and Fuller, as stated above, rewrote RPM to be usable on CAGE. It took each developer four months separately to finish each.
According to Brad, using RPM-based code allowed the composers to create more complex music, something MIDI wasn't capable of. Fuller also states a MIDI converter for RPM was made, but the audio team never used it. Brad stated that they did not use MIDI to allow the composers to take full advantage of the audio chips, and so they wouldn't have to worry with the limitations of MIDI.
NES
Brad used Music-V Language for his NES music using the NES version of RPM, which was the sound software converted to the NES from the Atari arcade machines. He composed the music for a majority of Tengen's NES games. Brad said this about Tengen Tetris:
PC
At ImaginEngine, Fuller wrote MIDI music using Cakewalk.
GBA
At ImaginEngine, Fuller adapted his MIDI files using MusyX, a sound tool by Factor 5.
On Lizzie McGuire: On The Go! he recorded his music and converted to game as RAW data.
Gameography
Picture Gallery
Linkedin.
Unknown source.
Facebook.
Brad Fuller (lower left) with the Klax (ARC) development team.
Facebook.
Facebook.
Facebook.
Links
- bradfuller.com - Official.
- facebook.com/bradallenfuller - Facebook.
- linkedin.com/in/bradfuller - LinkedIn.
- twitter.com/#!/bradfuller - Twitter.
- www.arcade-history.com/index.php?page=person&name=Brad+Fuller - Discography.
- ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-episode-97-brad-fuller-composer - Audio Interview.
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vimeo.com/150604581 - Video Interview (Deleted). - arcade-history.com/index.php?page=person - Works list on ArcadeHistory.
- legacy.com/obituaries/mercurynews/obituary.aspx?pid=177178687 - Obituary.
