In 1990 a game called Wing Commander was released by Origin Systems, a little company I lived up the street from ten years later in Austin, TX. The game sold well over a million copies and is considered one of the finest classic PC space simulation games of all time.
One of the standout features in this game was the music. The soundtrack for the first time tried to be cinematic, as the game itself was very cinematic. Programmer and director Cris Roberts himself has his infamous quote "what I'd really like to do is make movies", which he did years later when the game became a feature film. Amazingly the soundtrack, even on an Adlib soundcard, DID sound cinematic. The melodies were both sweeping and adaptive in the game itself, following every element of the action as though you were in an episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was fun and very impressive at the time.
The team who wrote the music for this was none other than Team Fat, led by George Alistair Sanger, aka "The Fat Man". Don't ask him why he's called The Fat Man when in fact he is not fat. George showed up at GDCs and E3s dressed in a Nudie suit covered with rhinestones. Couple this with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and you have the industry's first rock star. He really was. Now let's get to the bits you might not already know.
When I first met him it was after a lecture he gave on General MIDI at GDC where, when faced with the boring subject of making General MIDI instruments sound the same across numerous sound cards, he took his pants off to keep the attention of the audience. Afterwards I cornered him about MODs and he was in favor of them being very enthusiastic. His stock went up. When I told him about the great work on Wing Commander his first reaction was "thanks, but if you're talking about all those Alan Silvestri sounding cinematic bits that was pretty much Dave Govett standing right over there." Stock went up again. About thirty incredibly funny and insightful stories about the game and record industries later, plus fun jams and a trip to the driving range, the stock is pretty damn high.
Over the years he has enabled me to get my first editing job, write my first book, write my first game audio column, and go to the most exclusive computer music conference, Project Bar-B-Q. His heart is huge and I'll never be able to repay his kindness. While he is not as in the forefront these days of games, he's making a killing doing slot machine music and is lending some ground breaking knowledge to Multimedia Games' titles with new speaker systems and adaptive soundtracks. He also wrote the second book on video game audio: The Fatman on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness. His cohorts Kevin Phelan and Dave Govett are some of the world's most knowledgeable experts on Gigastudio. I wish him the best and hope he returns to write another Wing Commander. Because I know him fairly well, he'll never do that sort of thing again in the same way, but I'm single minded and nostalgic and can certainly dream.
