Tim Follin
Timothy John Follin is an English video game music composer, cinematographer, visual effects artist and game developer, who has written tracks for a variety of titles and home gaming systems, including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, Nintendo Entertainment System, Mega Drive, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Dreamcast, and PlayStation.
Follin has also co-founded a TV advertising company called ABF Pictures and a general-purpose media company called Baggy Cat Ltd, which to date has produced two video games, Contradiction and At Dead of Night, the latter receiving massive attention and acclaim on Steam.
Among Follin's works are the soundtracks to Solstice, Silver Surfer, Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, Plok!, and Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future.
Video game career
Insight Studios
As a child, Follin had no significant music training. Leaving Liverpool's Sandown Music College after one year of studies, Follin's career began at the age of 15 working at Insight Studios. Follin ended up in video games due to his older brother Mike Follin learning how to program for the ZX Spectrum and obtaining professional work at Insight. After developing a pulse-width modulation effect Tim wrote the music driver and soundtrack for their first professional game, Subterranean Stryker, followed by an arrangement of Stravinsky's "The Firebird", used for the game Star Firebirds. Follin then developed a three-channel sound routine which he used to create the music for his third soundtrack, Vectron. He then went on to create 4- and 5-channel music for games such as Chronos and Agent X. In his early career, Follin's music was praised in magazine game reviews.Follin's sole game programming credit came with his fourth title, Future Games, where he created one minigame of the several featured.
Software Creations
Hired by Richard Kay, Tim followed brother Mike in moving to Software Creations in 1987, his first full-time job, where he spent a significant portion of his career. Follin's arranged soundtrack to Bubble Bobble was his first written for a soundchip, the AY-3-8910.Follin wrote the music for Black Lamp in one night after a bout of writer's block.
Within the level 1 music of Ghouls'n Ghosts for the Amiga is a voice sample played backwards saying "secret authority", considered nothing more than a joke by Follin. Alongside Ghouls'n Ghosts, two other Amiga soundtracks, Sly Spy and Puzznic, were presented in the Amiga music format "Follin Player II". To arcade soundtrack arrangements like Bionic Commando and Ghouls'n Ghosts, Follin added richer sound palette and occasionally composed some new songs.
Follin described the NES title Solstice as "a very inspiring game to do music for," demanding atmospheric music within the game's dark castle environment, as well as powerful music choreographed with the title sequence. Follin did not use a keyboard or any instruments for the Solstice soundtrack, composing while "thinking along the lines of the computer and not a keyboard." Follin felt the programming-only approach allowed him to work with "a more open mind".
In a 1990 interview, Follin expressed "a bit of desolation" over the prospect of no longer composing for the Commodore 64, stating "I don't see myself staying with this machine," perhaps sensing the transition occurring in the European gaming marketplace as the third generation of video and computer game platforms reached its end. Follin's final Commodore 64 release came with 1991's Gauntlet III.
Beside contributing the soundtrack with brother Geoff, Follin recorded live sound effects for 1993 SNES title Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends.
Citing a declining work environment, Follin departed Software Creations in 1993.
Malibu Interactive and freelancing
After leaving Software Creations, Follin joined Malibu Interactive for 18 months. While working for Malibu, Follin provided the soundtrack for Time Trax on the Sega Mega Drive and Prime for the Sega CD, doing "virtually nothing and getting paid" for the following year before winding up out of work. Another title composed alongside brother Geoff, Firearm, went unpublished. Follin would spend the remainder of his video game career as a freelancer. Following Malibu Interactive's collapse, Follin then worked with groups that made unsuccessful game pitches to Psygnosis and the BBC. Follin provided part of the soundtrack for Batman & Robin, developed by Probe.Follin joined the development team of Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future as the title's lead composer around mid-1998, leaving Attila Heger no longer responsible for providing the entirety of the soundtrack. Follin had been offered the composer position by Sega UK producer David Nulty, who was a fan of Follin's Commodore 64 work. The soundtrack received very favourable reviews from Edge, DC-UK, and Official Dreamcast Magazine.
The 2003 multiplatform release Starsky & Hutch was given a funk-style score by Follin, who said at the time, "This is the project I had hoped I would get one day. I've always loved Starsky & Hutch and original title music." While with Software Creations, Follin had previously arranged the Starsky & Hutch television series' theme as the title music to the 1991 NES release Treasure Master.
End of video game career and return
Around August 2005, Follin announced on his website "with much delight" that he had chosen to stop composing music for video games, citing its irregular work not providing a substantial income, light-heartedly adding that the situation caused him "distress and illness". The tenuous nature of game development caused several instances of Follin being hired and subsequently having the project shelved. Follin noted that Starsky & Hutch had been in development for around three years before eventually being released.Towards the end of 2012 Follin decided to dust off an idea originally conceived as an interactive audio adventure game and reworked the concept as a video-based adventure game called Contradiction, which he designed and scripted, then filmed and programmed, also composing the game's soundtrack. The game was subsequently released on iPad and later on Steam. Follin then worked on another game, At Dead of Night, again using the FMV format but this time in the horror game genre, which was released at the end of 2020. In mid-2021, a playthrough of At Dead of Night was created by gaming YouTuber Markiplier, leading to a surge in popularity. A sequel is now in the works.
His brothers Geoff Follin and Mike Follin also worked in the video game industry as musician and programmer respectively, with both having moved on to other careers. Much like his brothers, Follin has changed careers, choosing to pursue films, television advertising, graphic design, visual effects and game design. Follin never considered himself a gamer as much as a musician or developer.
Game credits
Thoughts on video game music
Follin's methodology of music was that music is "basically an unconscious experience" that does not and should not "engage your intellect". Rather, Follin believed game music was "more of a sort of atmospheric thing" and had "always written music to be part of something else", intending for the video game to provide the image or scene of context.Within his personal experience, Follin always found the hardest part of creating music to be the concept phase, saying "I probably tear my hair out more over arrangement than over anything else." The easiest part was the execution of the solidified concepts.
Follin felt the idea of computer music was "a silly one to begin with", as soundchips from the earliest platforms were only meant to produce sound effects. As early as 1994, Follin expressed his desire to move away from scoring video games and transition to films, stating that he preferred never to work with chip-generated music again along with his hopes that the games industry would not move backwards from the emerging standard of CD audio. Whether dealing with the audio limitations of older consoles or a game's narrow style guidelines when composing for modern soundtracks, Follin regarded the challenge of creating music within constraints to be an interesting part of working in video game music.
During his game music career, Follin never had the mood or interest to join any demoscene groups. Though Follin knew few fellow video game composers, he highly respected Richard Jacques for the amount of work put into his music.
Influences
Follin cited progressive rock as well as many musicians as having had some casual or subconscious influence on his music, and has also enjoyed music by Deep Purple and Guns N' Roses. However, he did not feel that any specific artist or style had been a primary inspiration during his career. Follin acknowledged that in one instance he went for a more contemporary style when scoring the award-winning soundtrack to Bionic Commando, actively choosing to mimic other people's music for fear of potentially losing his job.The soundtrack to Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future may have been influenced by the works of American minimalist composer John Adams, whom Follin explicitly acknowledged as a current influence during the time he was completing the soundtrack, citing Adams' work as "the only minimalist stuff I've heard which struck a chord with me."
Follin did not have much time to listen to the work of his musical contemporaries while in the video games industry, a situation he implied as having been a benefit to his career. Follin speculated that in actively listening to those works, he likely ran the risk of encountering ideas he had not thought of and subsequently becoming discouraged and/or prone to copycatting.