HOME

ABOUT ME

SKILLS

SERVICES

PROJECTS

DOWNLOADS

FORUM

'MADFIDDLER'

So, who is Mark Knight?

Well, for as start I've been working professionally, in sound, for the games industry since 1992 (I was 19, so I'm not 'THAT' old. Before that, I was making music for various demos on the Amiga.

My first complete job was a contract for the developer Mindscape International, re-arranging the orchestral score for Wing Commander, for the Commodore Amiga and CD32 platforms. This soundtrack was recognised as being ahead of its time, attempting to recreated an orchestral soundtrack within the confines of the 4 channel sound chip - and a memory limit of less than 200kb. The soundtrack was also fully interactive, changing as your situation changed throught the game.

After Wing Commander, I accepted a full time position with Mindscape, as their sound co-ordinator (jack of all tracks audio bloke/monkey). During this time, I worked on many games/skus, including Captive 2 - Liberation ("one of the best soundtracks of all time"), the classic platform game, Out to Lunch, and the critically acclaimed follow up to Shadow of the Horned Rat, Warhammer, Dark Omen. I remained at Mindscape for 5 1/2 years, until the development team was shut down.

As a short job fix, I then went back to freelance work, to work with my old friend, Nick Pelling (who re-created Wing Commander for the Amiga) on Duke Nukem Total Meltdown for the Playstation. This involved remixing 11 of the PC tracks, and creating another 20 original tracks, in the space of 4 months. I took a bit of a gamble with this one. Duke is primarily a guitar based soundtrack, but since we were aiming for a slightly more European market I decided to make the soundtrack a little less guitar, and a little more electronic. Judging by the amount of fanmail I get for a game which is now over 12 years old, this worked.

Straight after DN-TM, I was offered a position at one of my favourite games developers, Bullfrog Productions. Suffice to say, with Electronic Arts' takeover of the company, this quickly changed into a position at EA. Initially working as a composer on titles such as Populous the Beginning, and Dungeon Keeper 2, I then took the position of Lead Audio Designer (in charge of all things noisey), for titles such as Quake 3 (ps2), Formula One, and Shox. As part of the EA sound team, I also won a BAFTA for Best Sound, with the game Theme Park World. My role was specifically implimentation of the sound into the game, and those dreaded memory reduction scissors.

I left EA in January 2003, to work with the chart band Massive Attack, creating string parts, and violin effects sounds (now you know what the "madfiddler" references may stand for). I had hoped that this would lead to further work with the bad, but unfortunately it didn't, so I decided to go back into freelance audio - thus keeping my options open for the future.

Whilst freelancing for Climax, working on Sudeki, I became more and more involved with Russell Kay's Visual Science in Dundee, Scotland. They had worked on F1 for EA, and contacted me during the development of one of their F1 games. This involvement ultimately resulted in me taking a full time position with them in 2004 to build an internal audio department. Sadly, in February 2006, Visual Science became yet another closure statistic, when a second project was cancelled by the publisher, and was forced to close.

In April 2006 I was proud to get the opportunity to go back to EA, all be it at a different studio in the North West of England. So I moved again, convinced by the promise of a 'job for life'. Six months later EA shut down the studio so I was again on the freelance market.

Having decided to stay put, and not move for any old job offer, I decided to go freelance again - but with a more open view to what I did. This time, I not only offering sound design, composing, and implimentation services for the games industry, but to also offered composing services for the film and television industries, whilst also teaching the violin and fiddle at home, sessioning for whoever would have me (including soloing at weddings and funerals, and teaching music production for the South Lancashire Arts Partnership in Chorley.

This all came to a head once I found out I was to be a Daddy, and realised I needed the "stablity" (???) of a full time job. I then accepted the fourth job offer from Codemasters Software, leading the audio team on their racing titles - which is a pretty damn good job for a petrol head like myself.