By the late 1980s a reviewer could recognise David Whittaker from the title screen. CRASH wrote in May 1987 of “a standard David Whittaker title track” on Mastertronic’s Amaurote, and in August called him “the prolific David Whittaker”. He had earned it. In January 1990 the Italian magazine K put his count at more than four hundred soundtracks, plus thousands of sound effects, across almost every machine a British publisher sold games for. Most of them he never saw running. “Any favourite tunes? No,” he told CRASH in 1987. “I usually end up hating them all after I’ve spent so much time writing them.”
From a band to Lazy Jones
Whittaker played guitar and keyboards in bands before he owned a computer, and The One reported in 1989 that he had been in groups since he was 16. He bought a Commodore VIC-20 in 1982. “I really started in February ’82,” he told ZZAP!64’s round-table of musicians in 1986, where he described being commissioned for a lot of small pieces for Commodore before moving to Terminal Software.
At Terminal he wrote a whole game as well as its music: Lazy Jones (1984) for the Commodore 64. The hero is an idle hotel worker who wanders the corridors avoiding the manager and a deadly cleaning trolley, and each room he enters holds a different mini-game with its own tune. Commodore Horizons printed a type-in extra screen for it in February 1985, “from David Whittaker of Terminal”. Fifteen years later the German act Zombie Nation built their 1999 dance hit Kernkraft 400 on one of the Lazy Jones tunes; Whittaker was later compensated for its use.
The game turned him into a composer. “After Lazy Jones came out, every programmer I knew who couldn’t write music came to me,” he told K. For a while he programmed and composed; as the demand for music grew, he gave up programming games. By August 1986 he was the resident musician at Binary Design in Manchester, and later he ran his own company, Musicon Design.
Spectrum 128 and the Einstein
On the Spectrum, the 128K models’ three-channel sound chip made Whittaker’s name. Binary Design’s Glider Rider (Quicksilva, 1986) scored 80% in CRASH on the 48K Spectrum and 92% on the 128K, and a CRASH reviewer called it “the first 128 game with any sort of enhancement”, made “much more atmospheric by music”. By November 1987 CRASH reported that Musicon Design wrote “most of the tunes that emit from the 128K music chip these days”, including The Living Daylights, Glider Rider and The Tube.
The same CRASH feature explained how he worked. He wrote his Spectrum tunes with his own driver, “the piece of code that makes the music data run”, on a Tatung Einstein, then sent the data down an RS232 lead into a Spectrum’s Interface 1. A routine took anything from half a kilobyte for a jingle to 3K including the driver. He rarely saw the games: he might be given a general theme or a tempo, or occasionally a known tune to convert, as when Infogrames asked him for the Chariots of Fire theme.
Code Masters’ budget games were a large part of the output. CRASH reviewers called the title tune of Super Robin Hood “a great David Whittaker piece” in June 1987, and in November gave ATV Simulator a “good David Whittaker tune with neat FX”. Not every reader was charmed. A CRASH correspondent in September 1988 asked whether “Dave Whittaker [is] onto a nice little earner? He loads up old Commodore tunes off disk onto his Einstein, downloads them to his Speccy and Code Masters give him loads of money.” Whittaker was open about reusing material. He told The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels that he had written some tunes in a few minutes, and that in dry spells he would “borrow ideas from others (i.e. plagiarise) and even from myself”; his Red Max, he admitted, was “my rip-off of Rob’s Commando – but more of an homage really”.
CRASH‘s readers still voted for him. In February 1989 the magazine’s first readers’ Top 10 Music chart included his Amaurote. The same year Miles Gordon Technology hired him to write the music and sound-effect drivers for the SAM Coupé’s six-channel Philips SAA1099 chip, and a SAM Coupé diary in CRASH that December called him “maybe the best computer musician in the business”.
Samples on the Amiga
The Amiga’s four channels of sampled sound (see Paula) suited him. Because he could program, he wrote his own Amiga driver, which could play real-time synthesised sounds alongside samples. Allister Brimble, a later Amiga composer, wrote that this gave him “a huge advantage over the competition”. Whittaker described his method. He composed on a separate synthesiser, a Roland Jupiter 6, a Yamaha CX5M or a Korg M1, and “manually entered each note by hand, into an assembler file of my drivers”. Because the note format was the same across the C64, Spectrum, ST, Amiga and PC, he could cut and paste between versions.
By May 1989 The One listed Xenon, Speedball and Obliterator among his 16-bit work. For the Bitmap Brothers’ Xenon 2: Megablast he arranged Bomb the Bass’s “Megablast”, the track that gave the game its subtitle. For Psygnosis’s Shadow of the Beast (1989) he was given, he said, “a ton of (by the standards of the time) sample/music memory/disk-space”, and he recorded the Korg M1’s pan-flute sounds at 20 kHz, “instead of the usual 8–12, which is why they’re so clear and breathy”. When ZZAP!’s readers voted on Amiga music in 1990, Xenon 2 came top of the July chart; in August it was second and Shadow of the Beast third, behind Jonathan Dunn’s Batman: The Movie. He went on to score Shadow of the Beast II (1990) and Ocean’s Epic, for which ACE reported in February 1991 that he had written the music and effects, “including some sampled speech”.
America and after
In June 1993 Whittaker and his wife moved to the United States, where he worked for Electronic Arts at its Redwood Shores studio in California; Rob Hubbard, already at EA, had approached him about a job doing sound for its Mega Drive and SNES games. He later returned to England. Public reference works say he became head of audio at Traveller’s Tales in Knutsford, Cheshire, in September 2004, and The Story of the Amiga in Pixels shows him there in 2005. The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels names the company’s LEGO games as his recent work. Wikipedia lists his last game credits in 2007.
Sources
- CRASH issue 33, October 1986: Glider Rider preview (Quicksilva, programmed by Binary Design). Issue 36, January 1987: Glider Rider Smash for the 128K version only. Issue 47, December 1987, p. 101: Glider Rider in the review index, 80% (128K version 92%), “The first 128 game with any sort of enhancement”.
- CRASH issue 40, May 1987: Amaurote review (“a standard David Whittaker title track”). Issue 41, June 1987: Super Robin Hood review. Issue 43, August 1987: The Tube (“the prolific David Whittaker”). Issue 46, November 1987, pp. 114–115: “Playing for Beeps” (Musicon Design, the Einstein and Interface 1, routine sizes, Chariots of Fire, his favourite tunes); ATV Simulator review.
- CRASH issue 56, September 1988: reader’s letter from Gerald Byrne about Spectrum music routines.
- CRASH issue 61, February 1989: readers’ Top 10 Music chart (Amaurote, Dave Whittaker).
- CRASH issue 69, October 1989, and issue 71, December 1989: MGT’s SAM Coupé sound software.
- ZZAP!64 issue 16, August 1986, pp. 39–41: “The Musicians’ Ball”, round-table with Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Tony Crowther and David Whittaker.
- Commodore Horizons, February 1985, pp. 19–20: Lazy Jones type-in screen (the manager and the cleaning trolley).
- The One issue 8, May 1989: Xenon 2 preview (“Megablast”, his 16-bit credits, Lazy Jones for Terminal, the VIC-20 in 1982).
- K (Italy), January 1990, p. 11: “Musica, maestro!”, interview (more than 400 soundtracks; Lazy Jones; the Einstein; 4K for music on 8-bit machines).
- ZZAP! issue 63, July 1990, and issue 64, August 1990: readers’ Amiga music charts.
- ACE issue 41, February 1991: Epic (music and effects) and Shadow of the Beast II.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books), p. 54: Lazy Jones, Kernkraft 400, Whittaker on writing quickly and on Red Max, the LEGO games for Traveller’s Tales.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books, 2017), pp. 208–210: Allister Brimble on David Whittaker, with Whittaker’s account of his method and Shadow of the Beast.
- Wikipedia, “Lazy Jones” (web, secondary): the hotel setting; Kernkraft 400 and the payment to Whittaker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_Jones
- Wikipedia, “David Whittaker (video game composer)” (web, secondary): the move to the US in June 1993, Electronic Arts at Redwood Shores, Traveller’s Tales from September 2004, credits to 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Whittaker_(video_game_composer)
- Video Game Music Preservation Foundation wiki, “David Whittaker” (web, secondary): the approach from Rob Hubbard at EA in 1993. https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/David%20Whittaker