#tim follin

[johntayjinf]

i thought this would be really fucking stupid but pico-8 turned out to be a little more versatile than i thought

#chiptune #...chiptune?? #pico 8 #silver surfer #tim follin #geoff follin #wip

[tickfleato]

oh yeah so we all know the nihilism meme yeah? ok well. it turns out it comes from the cartridge art... for a game with tim follin music of all things. check this shit out:

#tim follin #obviously found this out by listening to a giant mix of tim follin music. because what else would i listen to

[blazehedgehog]

Do you have any idea why Tim Follin got stuck working on games that are almost all considered to be bad (except for possibly Plok! and Ecco)? I thought it would have been something about the British games industry, but Grant Kirkhope got to work on games that are considered at least flawed classics.

Because at the time the games didn't seem to be bad.

Like that's the thing to always keep in mind with old games that seem bad. It was the wild west. Nobody knew anything. When you're trying to establish what the idea of "fun" is, well, what is fun?

You can clone another game wholesale because you already know that game is fun, but why is it fun? What elements about it make it fun? When you slice away all the characters, all the graphics, all the music and presentation, what is the core gameplay heart that generates the fun?

Nowadays you have endless hours of video essays and entire books written on individual games. But back then? None of that existed. If you were lucky and rich enough maybe there was a BBS you could connect to that would let you chat with a few other garage developers, or maybe you'd meet up for drinks with some industry folks at a convention or whatever, but it's nothing like it is today. The resources and knowledge base were extremely small.

So you made a guess, and made a game around that guess, put that out into the world and observed what happened. If it sold well, you made more.

But sales have never been an indicator of quality. They're just sales. Maybe people buy it because they think the character looks funny, maybe the marketing hit really well, maybe you've got a license people have prior interest in, etc.

Which naturally leads to the next problem, which is trying to understand what you did right and how to expand and evolve on what you did right. And if you don't actually know what you're doing right, it could lead you in some very strange directions. With each game you stray, and stray, and stray...

And the public doesn't know either! Both the developer and the people buying the game could be completely wrong, but at this specific time, this specific place, with the standards and understanding of the era, nobody knows better. In the moment, it seems fun! It's not until 10, 15, 25+ years later that anyone realizes "Wow, this was actually awful."

Sometimes it wasn't awful! Sometimes one of those games got it right and the bar got raised a little bit. But it was a different time and standards were nothing like they are today.

And with Tim Follin specifically, he also notes that he wrote a lot of his music before the game itself had even been made. From Wikipedia:

"Particularly in the earlier days of his career, Follin often composed game soundtracks while the games themselves were still in the writing stages, meaning that there was usually no frame of reference or genre objective in mind."

So in a lot of cases he was just making whatever he thought sounded nice, and as long as he got paid for his work, nothing else really mattered.

Honestly? There's not much more you could ask for in life.

#questions #fanofsmbx #tim follin #british #gaming #wild west #chiptune

[magnetictapedatastorage]

ONE CHANNEL. ONE CHANNEL. And not even a "real" channel, it was a "beeper", an extremely crude speaker often described as "1 bit"

and yet he manages to make it sound like 2-3 instruments jamming out!!! Tim Follin is a fucking wizard. yes it sounds supremely crusty, in fact he described it himself as sounding "like a vacuum cleaner full of nails" but this is still fucking insanely impressive. it reminds me, and i mean this in the most respectful way, of the "all i want for christmas is you" that was converted to MIDI. there's that similar sensation, where you you swear you can hear sounds that shouldn't be technologically possible, emerging from the noise.

its my favorite chiptune, even though it does sound like a vacuum cleaner full of nails.

#tim follin #chiptune #zx spectrum #Youtube

[pixelcoast]

Boss by Tim Follin from the game Plok! on the SNES

#plok #snes #super nintendo #video game soundtrack #Tim Follin

[posthumanwanderings]

[ Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future - The Lake (NoPlay) ]

#Tim Follin #Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future #dreamcast #dreamcast music #relaxing VGM #NoPlay #VG water #ecco the dolphin #defender of the future #atmospheric VGM #new age music #underwater #dolphins #dolphin

[idonthaveabmxbike]

MAYA MOMENT!!!!!!! (under my skin by jukebox the ghost plays in the distance)

#at dead of night #at dead of night fanart #bmx.art #digital art #chloe booyens #huld martha #tim follin #please god i spent so long on this

[titleknown]

IDK what's funnier, the fact that Tim Follin is mainly making FMV games now, or the fact that apparently they're actually pretty good.

Like, leave it to the guy who composed a chiptune prog-rock masterpiece for the fucking Pictionary game to make FMV games cool I suppose...

#tim follin #video games #fmv games #silly #weird #good

[7grandmel]

Todays rip: 14/04/2024

Thwâmpröck Desert

Season 8 No Album Release (Read More)

Ripped by Madinstance

So you know how yesterday's post was about a ripper with a very clearly defined niche of work, with Jamangar and Locked In The Underground? And earlier in the week I was covering the sheer prowess of ripper Madinstance, the raw power he exudes with I will Never be a Redneck? And just a few more days before that, where I talked about how much Mario Kart Wii's music means to me with Sweatpants Select? Well amidst my lineup of possible future posts, I slowly realized how perfectly Thwâmpröck Desert fit all three categories - a great way to end the week, and another Season 8 rip to boot.

Madinstance is an exceptionally skilled ripper, that much I hope I've made clear over my past posts on him. But with a few exceptions from time to time aside, he's also a ripper with a rather particular focus - a lot of his greatest rips, such as Every Mob Wants to Rule My World, Fell From a High Place (Reprise) and M​-​O​-​O​-​G City, are all focused on paying respects to Minecraft and its legendary original composer C418, wheras recently Initial Deluxe (I've Just Raced on this Course Before) appears to reveal a newfound love for the Mario Kart series. You may think at first thumbnail glance that Thwâmpröck Desert is an extension of that, a rip of a Mario Kart game, but there's one more field of his expertise that I'm yet to cover on here. C418 is beloved by many, yes, but within those privy to video game music history, particularly in the chiptune community, few composers are as revered and celebrated as the Follin brothers, Tim Follin and Geoff Follin.

To VGM aficionados, they need no introduction - but then, its those same aficionados who would know such things as that Robocop on Game Boy of all games has amazing music, as I discussed in Viva La Robocop. Most others, those who are primarily video game fans, will simply choose their favorite composer based on their own favorite games. That's completely valid too, of course, many long-running franchises like Kingdom Hearts, Sonic the Hedgehog, Dark Souls and so forth have key people composing for them that are incredibly distinct, to where you KNOW what a Kingdom Hearts game will sound like, what a Dark Souls game will sound like, and so on. Yet what makes the Follin brothers so fascinating in contrast, is that their soundtracks were attached to all kinds of games from all sorts of places: Ecco the Dolphin on Dreamcast, Silver Surfer on NES, Pictionary on NES, Plok! on Super Nintendo - practically the entire spectrum of games of the 80s and 90s, from shovelware to all-time classics, the Follins contributed to. Yet to them, the individual game quality hardly mattered! Be it Pictionary or Plok, Tim and Geoff Follin composed every soundtrack like it was their life's greatest achievement, creating full-on chiptune prog-rock in games that had NO business going that hard (I know that's a bit of an overdone and reductive turn of phrase, but really - PICTIONARY???) The brothers knew how to make any platform they were working on positively sing, and their obscure weirdo games have become titans amidst VGM enthusiasts as a result. An underdiscussed side of video game history, still cherished by a specific subset of nerds yet today.

Which, then, brings us back to Thwâmpröck Desert - an arrangement of one of Tim Follin's most insane pieces, the title screen music for NES game Solstice. It deserves a listen all of its own - the way it fakes you out with the most barebones little ditty of all time before switching into a rock masterpiece is an absolute work of art, and the piece just keeps growing from there, at once impossibly layered yet incredibly cohesive. Madinstance LOVES ripping the Follins' work, he's made a name for himself in part for ripping the SNES game Plok! in particular during Season 6 and Season 7, yet even still I was unsure how well Thwâmpröck Desert could really work. Its not a rip of a Follin composed game like the aforementioned Plok! rips - its arranging this impossibly dense piece of music into a song that already sounds like the violin version of pure, yet elegant, panic. Yet I suppose that also makes it the perfect fit for the Solstice title theme's sheer density - and when actually listening to Thwâmpröck Desert, its hard to imagine that Thwomp Desert ever sounded any different.

It's just - GAAHH!!! Its fucking mind-boggling how good it sounds, how this odd song I'd barely thought about from Mario Kart Wii wound up being the perfect template to arrange Follin's music into. The melody's string instruments are perfect for the Solstice title theme's pure distilled chaos whilst still capturing that sense of elegance and flow, and the most quirky instruments still present in Thwomp Desert add a delightful texture to the arrangement. I have to pause it every 10 or so seconds I listen to just process all that I've heard - the percussion, lead, backing, the progression of the song, its all handled absolutely masterfully, I cannot BELIEVE this was just dropped on us on a normal tuesday! I will Never be a Redneck was at least a season premiere!!

Whew...well, alright, I hope you get the picture - The Follin brothers' music fucking rocks, and I am SO glad that a ripper as amazing as Madinstance has taken it upon himself to pay regular tribute to their work. Games like Mario Kart Wii are leagues more mainstream than the games that the Follins typically worked on, and the idea of SiIvaGunner getting less VGM-savvy viewers to find out about these legendary composers - it just makes me really happy! Madinstance's rips are bangers to be sure, but much like Beautiful! ~ Curveball of Sean Kingston, like Beyond the Floating Isles, like Gate Happy: they're bangers that can also open up a whole new world of musical interests to viewers like you and I. And isn't that just the coolest way for SiIvaGunner's art of subversion to live on in?

(oh, also, its called Thwâmpröck Desert because the Solstice NES game takes place in "Kâstleröck" and I just found that very funny)

#todays siivagunner #season 8 #siivagunner #siiva #tentative rip name #Madinstance #mario kart #mario kart wii #mkwii #wii music #nintendo wii #mario kart music #tim follin #geoff follin #tim follin music #solstice #nes music #chiptune #nes games #chiptune music #vgm #Youtube

[theinashow]

#plok #boxing glove #geoff follin #tim follin #video game ost #too good #rocky balboa #leitmotif

[johntayjinf]

a jesper kyd x tim follin inspired original

i got inspired after listening to a lot of jesper kyd's mega drive works... sub-terrania in particular do i love a lot - and this was directly inspired by funky writer from the same game!!

#chiptune #sega mega drive #sega genesis #16 bit #jesper kyd #tim follin

[musicmakesyousmart]

#music #Tim Follin #Plok #synthwave #synthpop

[scooblee]

#my movie #tim follin #geoff follin

[kelpmore]

#audio #any follin brother fans in chat..... #plok #geoff follin #tim follin

[nouveau-riche-princess]

#music #tim follin

[posthumanwanderings]

[Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future - Perils of the Coral Reef]

#Tim Follin #Ecco the Dolphin #Defender of the Future #NoPlay #dreamcast music #Appaloosa Interactive #relaxing VGM #ambient #atmospheric VGM #underwater #ocean #click hyperlink for my relaxing Dreamcast music playlist #ecco the dolphin defender of the future #VG scenery