| Nathan Grigg |
 |
| Born |
1970 |
| Birth Place |
Unknown |
| Nationality |
American  |
| Aliases |
Nate Grigg, Orca Games |
|
Nathan Grigg is an American composer, sound designer, and sound programmer who has been composing music for games since the early 90's. He started playing piano when he was six years old and was able to memorize his ideas which led him to music composition. From 1989 to 1991, he studied music composition with Peter Winkler and Randlette, and from 1991 to 1992 studied with Janice Gitek. In 1992 Nathan graduated the Evergreen State College with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Later, he and his wife Elizabeth started Orca Games and composed music for Alexandria, and composed the music and sound to his first video game, Sylvester & Tweety in Cagey Capers for the Sega Genesis. Nathan currently works at Monolith, where he still composes video game music to this day. His best known work is for the F.E.A.R. games.
Music Composition
Grigg said this about his game music:
“
Sylvester and Tweety was my first released game score. I also did all the sound effects design for the title. As a source of income for our basement start-up, Orca Games, I did a series of titles as an independent vendor for the developer Alexandria Inc. from 1993-1995. Orca had no venture capital and our ultimate goal of developing our own titles never fully got off the ground, but the audio gigs managed to keep us going for awhile. Devin joined us in 1995--or possibly late in '94.
When the post-16-bit console chaos hit soon after (what was the next big thing going to be: the Saturn, the Jaguar, the 3DO? None of the above it turned out) I jumped over to Microsoft to work on music and audio for reference titles, games, and the launch of MSN. I joined Monolith in 2001 and have been there ever since.
The Genesis work for Alexandria was all done with GEMS (a third-party audio dev kit created by Jon and Mark Miller). 6 4-op FM voices, 3 PSG voices, and one 8-bit, 10.4 kHz sample voice. Brutal limitations, but it could sing if you had patience and vision. I also did some SNES cross-platform work on two titles. The SNES work was all done with an audio development kit from Bitmasters. That was 8 sample voices with no filtering and a maximum of 56K loaded at one time. Translating content between those two platforms was total insanity, and a lot of fun.
„
GEN
Grigg created MIDI files and used GEMS to convert to the Sega Genesis.
SNES
Grigg used the SNES SLICK/Audio engine from Bitmasters.
PC
Grigg used DirectMusic Producer.
Gameography
Aliases
Grigg used the moniker Orca Games during his time with the company.
Picture Gallery
Interview with Gameinformer.
Links
