Jeroen Tel wrote some of the Commodore 64’s best-known game music while he was still at school. He and his friend Charles Deenen, two Dutch teenagers who had met at computer club meetings in Venlo, set up Maniacs of Noise to write music and sound effects for other people’s games. British publishers such as Hewson, System 3 and US Gold hired them, and by 1994 Edge credited the pair with more than 300 C64 and Amiga titles. Deenen, later an audio director at Interplay in the United States, remembered what set Tel apart: “He astounded me from day one with his perfect pitch ear”. He could write a piece straight into assembly language, Deenen said, “without sometimes even hitting play once, and it sounded great.”
Maniacs of Noise
Tel was about 14 when he wrote his first game soundtrack. Early in 1993 he told Commodore Force that he had owned a C64 for about nine years and had been making music on it for about seven. Edge dated Maniacs of Noise to 1986 (public reference works give 1987), with Deenen just 16. “It kind of started as a joke,” Deenen recalled. At first he programmed the music drivers and sound effects while Tel wrote the music. Only after the first few games did Deenen try composing himself, and he admitted that “the first few attempts were pretty horrific.”
The pair came out of the Dutch C64 scene, but Tel said they were aiming beyond it from the start: “When I started Maniacs of Noise with Charles Deenen we were pretty active in the scene, but even then we wanted to make music for professional games.” Hewson became a regular client. The C64 version of Raffaele Cecco’s Cybernoid (1988) got a new theme from Tel, while the Spectrum and Atari ST versions used Dave Rogers’s music. “The C64 version was great,” Cecco told Retro Gamer years later. “And that music…” Tel scored Cybernoid II as well, and Commodore User gave Cecco’s Stormlord 90% for sound in June 1989, crediting “Charles Deenen and Jeroen Tel of the Maniacs of Noise” and singling out a guitar sample.
Samples on the SID
That guitar is a clue to how Maniacs of Noise sounded. The SID chip has three synthesiser voices and no sample channel, but a program can play crude 4-bit samples by writing values to the chip’s master volume register thousands of times a second. It costs a large share of the processor’s time, and on the later 8580 chip the result is almost silent. Retro Gamer’s C64 book counted Savage and Turbo Out Run by the Maniacs of Noise among the pieces where samples, “when utilised homogeneously”, added to the music.
Turbo Out Run (US Gold, 1989) was the one Tel called his most popular. ZZAP!64’s reviewer enjoyed its “lengthy Maniacs of Noise tunes”, and in August 1990 its readers put it second in their C64 music chart, behind Tim Follin’s Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts. System 3’s Myth: History in the Making, which ZZAP! made a Sizzler at 94% in December 1989, was his too.
The Sonic Circle
By 1991 Tel was working under his own name. ZZAP! announced that the C64 version of Virgin’s strategy game Supremacy would have “some superb music and three-voice FX from The Sonic Circle, otherwise known as Jeroen Tel”, and credited him directly on Probe’s C64 conversions that year. The shooter Rubicon, reviewed at 88% in September 1991 and released by Hewson’s successor 21st Century Entertainment, carried “a superb Maniacs of Noise soundtrack”, and the next spring ZZAP! described Ocean’s RoboCop 3 as having “a moody Jeroen Tel (ex-Maniacs of Noise) soundtrack”.
In the 1993 Commodore Force interview he listed his clients as Probe, Ubi Soft, Sega, US Gold, System 3, Thalamus, Hewson, Interplay and Nintendo, and said he now wrote for the Amiga, PC, Game Boy, NES, SNES and Mega Drive as well as the C64. His favourite was US Gold’s Out Run Europa (1991), whose C64 version ZZAP! had credited to Maniacs of Noise: “I only had two channels to work with, but I managed to make it sound like it was four.” His least favourite was Nighthunter: “I was asked to write it in three hours, which I did, but it lacks any soul or feeling.”
Later work
Tel kept writing for Nintendo’s machines through the 1990s. Public reference works credit him with NES music and with Warlocked (2000) for the Game Boy Color, and say he later spent several years at the Norwegian developer Funcom. He has also performed his C64 music as a DJ and remixer, and in 2015 he launched a crowdfunding campaign for Tel Me More, an album of remixes of his C64 tunes.
Sources
- Edge issue 15, December 1994: feature on game music, with Charles Deenen on Maniacs of Noise (set up in 1986; Deenen 16; drivers and effects; Hewson, Probe, Dinamic, Digital Design and System 3 as clients; over 300 C64 and Amiga titles; Deenen at Interplay).
- Commodore Force issue 2, February 1993: interview with Jeroen Tel (the scene and Maniacs of Noise, The Sonic Circle, his games and clients, Out Run Europa and Nighthunter).
- Retro Gamer issue 102, May 2012: the making of Cybernoid (Dave Rogers’s music on Spectrum and ST, Tel’s new theme on the C64; Raffaele Cecco’s comment).
- Commodore User, June 1989: Stormlord review by Tony Dillon (sound 90%; Deenen and Tel; the guitar sample).
- Retro Gamer: The Commodore 64 Book (2012): samples in Savage and Turbo Out Run.
- ZZAP!64 issue 56, December 1989: Turbo Out Run and Myth reviews. Issue 59, March 1990: review index (Myth, 94%). Issue 64, August 1990: readers’ C64 music chart.
- ZZAP!64 issue 71, March 1991: Supremacy preview (The Sonic Circle). Issue 74, June 1991: Probe conversions, “Sound: Jeroen Tel”. Issue 77, September 1991: Out Run Europa (“Sound: Maniacs Of Noise”). Issue 81, February 1992: Rubicon released (88% in issue 77). Issue 82, March 1992: RoboCop 3.
- Magic, “Up Close & Personal: Jeroen Tel”, Hugi issue 38 (web, secondary): his first soundtrack at 14, meeting Deenen in Venlo, Deenen’s description of him, DJ work and remixes. https://hugi.scene.org/online/hugi38/hugi%2038%20-%20demoscene%20interviews%20magic%20jeroen%20tel.htm
- Wikipedia, “Jeroen Tel” (web, secondary): birth, the 1987 founding date, NES work, Warlocked, Funcom, Tel Me More. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeroen_Tel