Tiertex

Tiertex

Founded	1987-??-??
Closed	2021-08-05
Headquarters	Manchester, England
Website	http://www.tiertex.com
Other Names	Tiertex Ltd. Tiertex Design Studios

Tiertex (also known as Tiertex Design Studios) was an English video game developer, founded in 1987 by Donald Campbell and John Prince. They were known for converting arcade games to home consoles and computers, sports games, and movie-based video games. Until around the time of their SNES and Game Boy Color development, the company rarely ever put credits in their games, but it is unknown why. However, it could be due to their rushed, therefore poor conversions.

Tiertex continued to develop games up to the sixth generation of video games. Because they struggled to keep up with the seventh generation, they switched to developing USB development boards and displays for industrial purposes.

The company closed its doors on August 5, 2021.

Games

Music Development

Commodore 64

Mark Tait programmed his own sound driver and wrote the music in assembler. He originally wrote demos, which were picked up by various developers as a result. Tiertex hired Tait through his demos to do the music to 1943 (C64), after which he was offered and accepted a full-time job with the studio.

Since 2008, HVSC credits four C64 game soundtracks to John Hancock. Unfortunately, they did not mention sources. Mercs (C64) is in Tait's driver, the other three are in an unknown driver.

Game Boy

MIDI files were converted to Donald Campbell's sound driver. Mark Ortiz was the only composer for their Game Boy games.

Listening to Ortiz's original MIDI files, either intentional or by error, the Game Boy sound engine plays the converted MIDI files a half-step higher.

This sound driver was used by Handheld Games in NBA Live 2000 and Triple Play 2001 through reverse engineering, due the NBA Live 2000 uses assets from NBA Live 96.

Their later Game Boy Color games used the MusyX audio tools by Factor 5.

Game Gear/Sega Master System

The music was programmed in assembly on a sound driver programmed by Donald Campbell. Most of these games lack credits, but Shaq Fu credits one of the founders, John Prince, as the game's sound designer.

Genesis

Donald Campbell programmed the Genesis sound driver for Tiertex. Composers would write their music in MIDI and Campbell would convert the files to a format read by the driver.

SNES

Donald Campbell programmed the sound driver for Tiertex's SNES games. Composers would write their music in MIDI and the files would be ran through a converter, where they would be outputted as .txt files.

For Madden NFL '98 and NBA Live '98, Tiertex used Visual Concepts' sound engine by Jason Andersen and John Schappert.