Yeah, it’s funny, because probably right now we are getting more video games with more depth than we ever have. They’re all kind of ambitious and have presentational aspects which you probably couldn’t even have technically done ten years ago, with the amount of graphics and sounds that all go into them.
So in terms of like your career, can we talk about your roots as a musician, and when exactly video games started to become a professional option for you?
Yeah. My whole life, my two greatest loves and passions growing up were video games and music. But I never thought to ever put the two together, because there was no such thing as a video game composer in the 70s. My parents were a product of the 50s. I was listening to Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. In the early 70s, when I was four or five years old, I started playing piano when I was three, and I never — I just played by ear. I never had professional training or I don’t know how to read music. I have just always played by ear. So for me, I was four or five years old, banging out Great Balls of Fire and things like Jailhouse Rock to impress mom and dad. So that’s kind of how I got into it. Then my cousin is a famous rock star. So I was always kind of listening to his music as well growing up. Steven Tyler from Aerosmith, his real name is Steven Tallarico.
Wow. I don’t think I knew that!
So growing up, I naturally started to get into the rock stuff and Aerosmith and Van Halen and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. That led to picking up the guitar and things like that.
Going to the movies–Star Wars, especially–led me to orchestral sounds and classical music. Then I picked up Beethoven. When I heard Beethoven, again, I really listened to it. Growing up, we always hear stuff like in Bugs Bunny, in cartoons or TV commercials. But when I first sat down and really listened to it as music, that’s what really kind of changed my life. Hearing Beethoven was like, oh my gosh, this is what I want to do. I want to compose music. Again, I was at a somewhat early age. So I would just listen to the Beethovens and the Mozarts and Holst’s Planets and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Then I started getting into more soundtracks by movie composers like Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams and those guys. But I never thought to ever put that together. It was always like, “Oh, I guess I want to be a film composer,” because that was the only outlet. I always loved video games, but, again, in the 70s and early 80s, composers weren’t doing that. There was no such thing. It was programmers doing blips and bloops.
The technological capabilities just weren’t there.
Right. This was before the digital music era. Then, when I turned 21, I left my parents literally crying on the doorstep, and I wanted to go out to California. I grew up in Massachusetts; I just got in my car and drove out West. I had no job, no friends, no money, no place to stay, nothing. I showed up in California, and I was homeless. I was actually sleeping under a pier at Huntington Beach for the first three weeks I was out there. But the very first day I got out there, I picked up a newspaper and I saw a job, selling keyboards at a Guitar Center. I went there the first day and they said, yeah, sure, you start tomorrow. The first day at work, I actually was wearing a video game t-shirt, which back in 1990, no one had video game t-shirt. Now you are walking in Wal-Mart and Target and freaking Hot Topic, and they are all over the place, right?