Matthew Cannon
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Matthew Cannon is an English composer and sound designer. He started working on games in 1988 when he worked at Ocean Software at the age of 15. At first, he was hired as a programmer, but after sending several demos of his music to their lead sound programmer Jonathan Dunn, Dunn suggested to Ocean that Cannon become a composer for them, and Cannon's first video game compositions were written for Ocean's computer game adaptations of Batman. In 1992, Cannon started working at Software Creations, where he worked on their SNES games.
In 1996, Cannon left the game industry to focus on his music studies.
Contents
Music Development
Commodore 64
Cannon said this in an interview regarding how he created music and sound effects on the computer:
Game Boy
Cannon used Jonathan Dunn's sound driver and composed the music in assembly.
For Bart and the Beanstalk, he also wrote in assembly, but used the Software Creations sound driver by Stephen Ruddy.
NES
Cannon used Music Driver V1.0, designed by Jonathan Dunn. Cannon says that for the NES version of Parasol Stars, he covered Over the Rainbow, but due to copyrights, he had to remove the song. In the USA and European version of Hook, the credits do not list him because there's not enough space on the screen. However, in the Japanese version, his name is listed in katakana.
SNES
According to Cannon, he wrote the title music for Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (SNES). [1]
He also stated he worked on two songs for Rock 'n' Roll Racing, one of which didn't make it into the final game. [2]
To write music on the SNES, Matthew used Mike Webb's sound driver. Music and sound effects were written in 65C816 assembly machine code.
Gameography
Aliases
In Hook (NES), Matthew's name can be found only in the Japanese version's staff credits, presumably because his name couldn't fit with the large text of the international versions. In the Japanese version, his name, along with the other developers, was listed in Japanese katakana, possibly making him, as well as the rest of the staff the first English-speaking developers to have their names written in Japanese. His name in Japanese is pronounced "Mashuu Kyanon".
In Bart and the Beanstalk (GB), he is credited as Joe Smith. Matthew isn't sure exactly why his name was changed in the credits to Joe Smith, but presumed that it was due to the fact that he left the development studio, Software Creations during the game's development. Though Matthew said that it's possible the alias may belong to someone else, the fact that the game has only a short amount of music, all of which resemble Matthew's style, as well as the fact his name doesn't appear in the credits, is more than enough proof that the developers changed his name, most likely to prevent him from being hired by other game studios. However, Cannon quit the game industry after working on the game.
Picture Gallery
Found on composers.c64.org in 2004, possibly taken by themselves.
Twitter.
Twitter.
Links
- mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,59427/ - MobyGames.
- facebook.com/profile.php?id=1232655580 - Facebook (Closed).
- linkedin.com/in/matthew-cannon-6b5a522/ - LinkedIn.
- twitter.com/matt_p_cannon - Twitter.
- c64.com/?type=4&id=6 - Interview from May 10, 2010.
