@@indoor_vaping That’s more because demo composers are all poaching Bach because it’s public domain and Bach is popular with programmers for his intellectual rigor (see, like, Gödel Escher Bach)
Tim Follin is simply a genius. The fact that he could make music far too advanced for the hardware he used, as a teenager too! He's a big inspiration for me. And what a smooth transition at 18:55
@klaymodopostoffice9885 No, they were SHIT. Shit games, with a great soundtrack. And all your comments on this video prove that you were somehow involved in Software Creations, because your fanboy is showing.
So from what I've gathered here and listening to tracks around RU-vid, Tim is exceptional because: 1) Tim got the absolute MOST out of the sound hardware he was given, AND 2) He was an excellent musician and very creative composer. Very few video game composers in history I feel can honestly claim BOTH of these things.
Check the comments to Time Trax genesis. Tim Follin left a comment. He says he preferred doing chip tunes to the tech that came after it and that's one reason he retired and for a long time no one was doing chip tunes. So maybe he did like it after all.
yeah, listening to his thoughts more recently, I get the impression that he was just frustrated with the gap between the sounds in his head and the sounds he was able to pull out of the machine, which is pretty relatable as an artist. his enjoyment seemed to come from the technical challenge of it all
It's a fantastic video. Tim, Rob et al, were so inspirational to many of us C64 owners who later bought synths &, set up our own studios, etc, to make music. 🌅
absolutely a genius. I kept playing Equinox and Spiderman and X-men basically just to listen to the OST - the games themselves weren't that great. Later on thanks to emulators I also found other games he worked on, including Solstice on NES. an absolute chiptune legend.
Though I have no real proof, I think Gauntlet on the C64 work was mostly Geoff work. It's a very late C64 game (in 1992) and at this point Tim hadn't worked on the SID for some years, while Geoff did and the style itselfs sounds more like Geoff.
A thing to note about Tim's work on Ford Racing 2 is that pretty much all of it was just recycled from his Starsky & Hutch work, presumably due to both games sharing a publisher.
If Follin's music had been in better games, he'd be as well known as names like Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu, and David Wise. At least, decades latter, the internet didn't let such talent go without praise.
The worst luck indeed. Someone needs to go find him and give him the recognition he deserves. He quit making music a long time ago, and I bet it's partially because of that bad luck..
He did a panel a little bit ago. He said he had some bad experiences with the way he was being managed on teams, but moreso he was just kind of bored of working writing music. He just wanted to change indistries.
He's actually on youtube and sometimes comments on his work. If you look for "Tim Follins NES" you should get a few big playlists, chances are he responded there.
I believe he's made music for his two recent games that he headed himself, however it was not chiptune, and I doubt he will make any more chiptune music considering how much he disliked it.
tim follin deserves so much more man, he was such a fucking good composer who lost to some of the worst games to have his fucking banger ass music be included in.
@Klaymodo Post Office I've played Renegade and Ghouls and ghosts conversions.. well, ehm.. Not great. LED Storm is said to be a nice game. Silver Surfer isn't generally appreciated. Gauntlet 3 is the least appreciated of the series, etc. I can imagine that there were top coders there. But good code doesn't necessarily make a good game (or demo).. and I'm speaking from experience here. If I'm honest, Follin's contribution is the best part to a lot of these conversions and titles.
@Klaymodo Post Office I don't think the games were that bad. While the SNES and PC versions of Batman Forever are problematic the Mega Drive version is almost great. Regardless the soundtrack is terrific to listen to.
@klaymodopostoffice9885 i know you probably hold a soft spot for these games but the sales don't lie. whether it had bad gameplay or not, the man deserved to be working on a big title rather than being stuck in indie hell. i meant the worst games as in giving them little to no recognition just due to the lack of attention on those titles in specific. i've heard the nintendo story hundreds of times, and it's great, but it doesn't change the fact that they ended up never getting the music out on games that would ever have gotten them the well deserved attention they should have gotten from the time.
@klaymodopostoffice9885 It's not contempt, it's just the fact that it didn't perform well down here. We just never heard about it because the games never made a big impact in America, that's that. I'm not even trying to be cynical here, I just genuinely believe that the Folin brothers deserved better and should have been recruited for a big name IP rather than just relegated to a lot of smaller titles at the time.
Soooo, he had to run self modifying code in order to push progressive music through a 1 bit speaker? I'm sorry, but this guy isn't just a musician, he's a mad sound scientist and also an alien 😂
I'm happy a video like this exists on RU-vid, and I'm thankful someone like you took the (ungodly amount of) time to put something like this together -- and to do it so well! Tim Follin of all VGM composers deserved this kind of honorable treatment. Thanks to you, others can learn more about the man and his music in depth! Keep up the great work! I hope there are more videos like this from you in the future. You rock.
What an incredible Mix and information/history given about one of the most legendary composers the VGM scene has ever seen. The last 10 years Tim Follin has been a name I'm glad has gotten more attention and pretty much all his work he's done from his impressive ZX tunes to his last with Lemmings, that 20 years of his initial time in the industry and even though he's looked back on it with not the fondest of memories (especially for his chiptunes), he can't deny he truly made stuff that blew people away and did stuff with the soundchips barely anyone else could. Target Renegade & Treasure Master were my first introductions to him and it's been the start of my journey for pretty much everything in VGM, let alone NES music and all I've done with 8BitStereo. Love the flow of every section and transitions are just phenomenal. Hope someday Geoff Follin gets his own Artist Feature or like a Mini Feature, his work is just as fantastic even if it hasn't received as much attention as Tim's, but he certainly helped in making the SNES OST's he composed with Tim as fantastic as they are. But this video was absolutely fantastic and very well made! And to think this is the very first video of yours I saw actually very close to when it released, and sadly back then after seeing this I never fully checked out your channel, which has now become a tranquil hub for me recently from a lot of personal events and overall mood of what the last 2 years have been. I can't thank you enough GST for being such an amazing channel and showing true love, passion, interest, talent, and dedication to the niche parts of VGM, after rechecking this and going through all your mixes, it's been a real treat and look forward to your channels future content and growth! :)
Such a tease with Solstice. Cutting it off at the beginning like we were going to return later, dropping tons of references to it, while saying almost nothing directly... I was so certain that the ending would be some like: "And now, I leave you with Tim's masterpiece..." I brought Plok to a friend's place a few nights ago, and jaws were hitting the floor at the beach theme.
Dude, Plok! has one of the best soundtracks ever made and you only gave it a couple of seconds in this compilation?! Seriously?! What about the track "Beach" where it sounds like a real e-guitar is playing?
Yeah I know! Beach is my favorite song from the soundtrack and was what I was hoping to show, but with the way that the mix flowed, Akryllic meshed better. Also note that I was, at this point, 23 minutes into a video that I intended to be 10 minutes long. :S
I honestly did not know Follin recently made a game after not hearing about him for years. That sucks it did not get that much attention but it is easy to see why.
Nice exposition! Tim Follin is one of my favorite composers and I find his music amazing, especially considering the limitations of the hardware he worked on.
Conjo Bo Mama Mia There were definitely composers who only created supportive boring headaches on the 8bit machines. Tim Follin really stood out. Listen to L.E.D. Storm on C64 and you know why.
The Devil: "Foolish human, you'll never beat me. You have 1 bit to work with and a single sound channel." Tim Follin: "Just give me the gold fiddle already before you embarrass yourself."
Utterly brilliant coverage of one of the best videogame composers in history. I wish more people knew about Follin, and I also wish he would get back into the industry. Even without chip, his music was beautiful (consider Ecco on Dreamcast).
@klaymodopostoffice9885given the work he did, that makes sense. His music was leagues better then just about any other game at the time of each of his releases. Honestly I'd have been surprised if he was on time with any of his compositions
Wow, very good stuff! I recommend leaving the screen messages on for a bit longer, I found myself pausing the video a lot, though I can imagine that might be hard in some cases as the song needs to be mixed properly as well.
That's definitely an issue that I fret over a lot. I know there were a few spots where I cut the text a little shorter than I wanted, just because the next song was starting. I even had to remove a few blocks of text. :( Fun fact: the title theme for Solstice (used as the intro in this video) was inspired by a YES concert where they opened with "Starship Trooper". The first two chords are even the same!
I'm a very slow reader and had to do a lot of pausing. Still, it's a wonderful tribute to Tim Follin. I love how everything is in the style of the corresponding computer :)
a Geoff Feature has been a thought in my mind for quite some time. hearing that he's gone now... it's strange. I'm not sure how to handle it. He's going to get a Feature at some point. I want to wait a bit longer. I don't want to attract a bunch of views from people learning the news of his passing. I don't want to benefit from that. I prefer sending people towards the artist, getting some eyes on whatever the artist is doing today, but... yeah. :(
Son of a !!!! 😭😭😭 Tim Follin is an insane composer, I hadn't heard half of these before at all and my god he really made these machines sing!! I had intended to play this in the background while working on things but every time I had to stop and look because I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
Yeah, there is a interview where they make listen songs to Tim and, actually, quite a lot of them were initially composed by one and then the other completed it. Even there are songs that they we're actually made entirely by Geoff but they quite mimic Tim's style, or nothing at all.
The drums on the Agent X music are not playing properly, on a real spectrum they sound different, I can tell the sound in this video was from an emulator.
This completely blew me away! I've long been a fan of Tim Follin but this is next level. The mix from 15:41 all the way up to LED Storm at 17:30 is phenomenal, jazz prog chiptune. Just amazing.
Oh man, I did not intend for this video to be so long, but then: 40 minutes. I poured a ridiculous amount of time into making the video. Glad to see my efforts are appreciated!
your audio cuts were really precise, from a musicians perspective, it was nice to see that you were able to show a good bit of comparing and contrasting. i think when you have an introspective about an artist such as follin, its icing on the cake when theres some attention to detail like you put into it here. especially when you show their work chronologically and across more than one platform too. the time and effort shows, and i definitely subscribed and will pass this vid on, great job!
funny he says he didn't like synths and making chip tunes but did an awesome job and pretty well dropped out of game music after it became easier to produce LOL
Tim Follin is the best chip tune musician of all time, that's undisputed as far as I'm concerned. I totally get why he hates chiptunes. In the 80's, we were all frustrated kids with our limited spectrums and c64's. Making music was immensely frustrating on these computers due to the limitations. Most of these sound chips only had 3 sound channels, yet he was able to used arps and arpeggios with such skill that they actually sounded pleasing as opposed to just being workarounds. Tim Follin chip tunes might sound limited today, but they are all little miracles of mastery and musicianship. His later stuff is equally as great.
Ironically both Plok and Yoshi's Island end upn with epic scores. though I am sort of glad in the end that Plok ended up its own thing because of how great the soundtrack really is. If it had been attached to a Mario franchise game I doubt the OST for Plok would have been so fucking amazing.
Highlights aka LISTEN TO IT PLEASE 1:34- Agent X 4:11- LED Storm (ZX Spectrum) 10:50 C64 17:25 Amiga 7:45 Bionic Commando C64 16:55 Amiga 9:04 Ghouls and Ghosts C64 18:22 Amiga 13:52 MOTHER FUCKIN PICTIONARY 14:35 Silver Surfer 15:48 Treasure Master 19:05 Puzznic 19:55 The only Gauntlet III that matters Amiga 20:15 Super Off Road 20:55 Spider-Man and the X-Men 23:00 Plok 23:30 Equinox 26:25 ECCO the Dolphin 27:05 Time Trax 29:10 Ultraverse Prime 30:30 Starsky & Hutch 37:25 Contradiction
Tbh i'm happy Tim's music doesn't fit the games, because most of the time sadly he was hired for terrible games that survive only because of his music lol so in the end, the fact anyone still remembers the work of everyone that developed Pictionary is because of Follin
When Follin entered the game scene (for me it was the Commodore Amiga) we finally knew: games got on the pro level. I didnt know he did such great work on the Speccy before. Thanks for this video. Can hardly pick a favourite, but without any order: Ghouls ´n´ Ghosts, L.E.D. Storm, Bionic Commando. And all of the other stuff this genius wrote.
Tim Follin feels like a modern day Greek tragedy... It feels like he had the potential to be one of the greats. I could totally see him being just as celebrated as, say, Grant Kirkhope or David Wise, among many MANY other excellent video game composers. Now barely anyone remembers him or knows who he is. :(
"Barely anyone" If you think Tim Follin is unknown, what about others talented chiptune composers such as Allister Brimble or Alberto Gonzalez ? I see their names a lot less often than the Follin one.
Tim and Geoff were never video game guys themselves when they were at Software Creations. They slowly loathed the experience when they worked on various licensed projects.
This was such an awesome feature! It's kind of interesting that Tim preferred the more instrumental stuff over the chip stuff. His chip work really stood out, but the more he went into modern consoles, the more his music just kinda sounded like everything else. I didn't even realize he'd composed stuff outside of the old chip music.
"I'd rather hear recorded music played at 20KHz than computer music. The whole idea of computer music was a silly one to begin with. These soundchips were invented for sound effect accompaniment to a game, that's all it was. It's a bit of a waste of time if you're doing music that's going to be covered by sound effects in some poxy little game." that one hurt, mate
I skipped a lot of things. Chronos is definitely a highlight, but simply didn't make it into the mix... My only real regret is that i truncated the Plok section.
The computer and videogame industry would welcome Tim's music (and Geoffs) back with open arms. I maintain if some of his Amiga and SNES music was commercially released on CD it would sell. It's right up there with some of the best prog rock around!
This is absolutely fantastic. Video Game Music has always been a guilty pleasure of mine and this video beautifully describes the career of one of (if not) the greatest composers to ever do it. These days you can hire a live orchestra or a great producer (or both) to score your game, but to me there is something magical in one person stretching a old, simple sound chip as far as it can possibly go. Follin was a master at this. I certainly hope you can do other exposes on other legends of video game music, such as Jeroen Tel, Jochen Hippel and David Wise to name a few. You've earned a subscription today, friend.
As for my favorite track by Follin, I'd have to say the title theme from Ghouls n Ghosts, close second going to the title theme from Time Trax (not shown in the video). Both themes show omniscient knowledge of the sound chips and sound like nothing else on their respective systems. (ghouls n ghosts came with experience with the c64's sid chip, and Follin helped make the sound driver which made Time Trax's stellar OST possible)
Treasure Master gets an honorable mention, because... Simply... Who the heck wrote their music in damn 17/8 on nes?! Or 17/8 on any type of music for that matter? Also worth noting the Amiga Bionic Commando is also on a funky time signature
I think I understand where he's coming from regards to not liking his own music. It's a bloody marvel technically and there are some tunes and aspects of others that are also melodically rich and marvellous but it's technical accomplishment does I feel overshadow the composition side a lot of the time. I've always been super impressed by his work but more for his mastery of arpeggio etc than themes or lines that conclude. No denying some very epic stuff though at least in how impressive it comes off and how gorgeously atmospheric he could get but I can understand why he might have thoughts the way he does on it. His later more considered moody approach is I think something he's likely more pleased with but I think by this point he probably feels he's done with the artform as it can rather take it out of you some 20 years at it Didn't stop me being hugely influenced by his early work however and it was a very impactful time having these very talented tunesmiths around for a bar to aim towards. Great times and I hope he's in an at least reasonable place right now
@@Plasmariel I've listened to some of his more recent work in the form of more incidental and film like approach and It's rather good and I wouldn't be surprised if he wanted to write this way during his C64 days. I think he's more advanced than his earlier work would suggest and that was always very good. Looking back to something like the Plok for example,, I imagine he's less impressed by it in composition terms these days but damn was it impressive at the time. I think he understood that there was a limit to how musical structures in the form of arpeggio can sound if it's mostly the basis to how you work. There's such a lot I love from what he's done from that time but it's mostly the melody based parts that endure for me personally because that's where the heart of music lies
@klaymodopostoffice9885 Oh interesting. It was all quite experimental to everyone doing it and being so young for a lot of them it must have impacted how they took to their work. It took me a long time really understand anything about myself and I would have failed miserably doing what they did. But yeah still very much a topic of discussion because no matter how it was, they did mean a lot to so many. Cheers
I've got so much respect for my friend Tim, I can't describe it in words, but I will try: "R E S P E C T ! ! !" (Maybe the exclamation marks will do the job) Or maybe bolding it, would do the job: "RESPECT*
And I've got so much respect for you Jeroen! I still listen to Cybernoid II to this day and Maniacs of Noise were legendary. Thank you for sharing your talent with the world dude.
