Jonathan Dunn arrived at Ocean Software by luck of timing. He was studying music at college and making music on his Commodore 64 when friends talked him into sending demos to software houses. “It turns out I sent in my demo just as Martin Galway was preparing to leave the company,” he told Retro Gamer. “I was offered the job that day.” He joined Ocean’s in-house team in October 1987, and within a year CRASH reviewers were naming him in their verdicts on Ocean’s biggest games. He is best remembered for a tune he wrote for a handheld: the title music of Ocean’s RoboCop on the Game Boy, which later sold washing machines on British television.
Before Ocean
Dunn taught himself music, he told ST/Amiga Format in 1989, although he had taken a course in “Performance Music and Technology” at college, and by then he had been writing music for four or five years, “not always for sale and not always professionally”. His first published work was the music and sound effects for Subterranea, a game on Hewson’s budget label Rack-It, which ZZAP!64 reviewed in 1988. His interest was always as much in the computer as the music. He told Retro Gamer’s Commodore 64 Book that he “was at college studying music and programming, and I combined the two things”, and that he had meant to go on to university a year later, “but I never went.”
Olympic Challenge, Operation Wolf and RoboCop
His first Ocean game was Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge (1988). Besides the in-game music, the game came with an audio tape. Dunn recorded its tune, “The Challenge”, with a Korg M1, a mixer and a drum machine, and the vocal sample, he said, was Gary Bracey, who ran Ocean’s software development. The tune had a life outside the game: when Keith Chegwin’s television programme Chegwin Checks It Out visited Ocean, Dunn was filmed with Chegwin miming to it, and the programme used the clip in its opening titles every week. CRASH liked the Spectrum version’s “great Jonathon Dunn title tune and tunelets between events, plus a separate audio tape”.
CRASH‘s Christmas 1988 issue reviewed two more Ocean arcade licences with his music. On the 128K Spectrum Operation Wolf played “typically atmospheric Jonathan Dunn music” on its title screen, though the reviewer added that it “admittedly is a bit like that on Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge”; the review’s summary box praised “an excellent Jonathan Dunn title tune”. RoboCop, which CRASH gave 92%, had a 128K title tune that Retro Gamer later called “well known”, and on the C64 a “much deeper and menacingly resounding SID chip arrangement”. When CRASH started a readers’ Top 10 Music chart in February 1989, Dunn had two entries, RoboCop and Operation Wolf.
The work came at speed. In 1989 he told ST/Amiga Format that he was given roughly two weeks for each tune and would have liked much longer. On the 16-bit machines he had around 40K for music, much of it taken up by samples, and for Chase H.Q. he had, for the first time, been sent the arcade producer’s music score to convert.
Batman: The Movie and the 16-bit years
Dunn wrote the Amiga music for Batman: The Movie (1989); Matthew Cannon wrote the Commodore 64 version’s. When ZZAP!‘s readers voted in August 1990, Dunn’s Amiga Batman: The Movie came top of their Amiga music chart, ahead of David Whittaker’s Xenon 2 and Shadow of the Beast. That is a readers’ chart, not an award, but it shows how his music was heard at the time.
He stayed on Ocean’s film licences. ZZAP! reported in 1991 that “veteran Ocean music man Jonathan Dunn” was scoring Terminator 2, and The One credited him with the music for Ocean’s Amiga The Addams Family in 1992. His tunes were distinctive enough that ZZAP! printed a reader’s program, “The Jolly Jon Dunn Music Player”, that pulled his music out of Ocean’s C64 games and played it.
RoboCop on the Game Boy
The best-known Dunn tune comes from the Game Boy RoboCop. He wrote its chord riff, he told Time Extension in 2020, at the piano in his mother’s restaurant in Preston, after it had closed for the night. An advertising executive heard it when his son was playing the game, and the tune ended up in a television advert for Ariston washing machines. In 2012 it resurfaced in a track by the American rapper Lil B.
After Ocean
Dunn stayed at Ocean after Infogrames bought it in 1996, and according to public reference works left in 2000. He later worked in managerial roles in the games industry, including as an executive producer, and around 2014 moved into casino gaming. He has also released house music under the name Soularis. Asked in 2012 for his favourite of his own compositions, he chose the title music of Ocean’s Total Recall.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 105, August 2012: “The Making of the Daley Thompson Series” (joining Ocean in October 1987, the demo, Olympic Challenge, “The Challenge” tape, Chegwin Checks It Out).
- ST/Amiga Format issue 10, April 1989: interview with Jonathan Dunn (self-taught, the college course, Rack-It, two weeks a tune, 16-bit memory, Chase H.Q.).
- ZZAP!64 issue 72, April 1991: review index (Subterranea, Rack-It, 74% in issue 38, June 1988).
- Retro Gamer: The Commodore 64 Book (2012), “The SID Crowd”: Dunn on college and joining Ocean; his favourite composition; his occupation as executive producer.
- CRASH issue 58, November 1988: Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge review.
- CRASH issue 59, December 1988: Operation Wolf and RoboCop reviews.
- CRASH issue 61, February 1989: readers’ Top 10 Music chart.
- Retro Gamer issue 18 (2005): the versions of RoboCop and Dunn’s title music.
- ZZAP! issue 64, August 1990: readers’ music charts (Matthew Cannon, C64 Batman: The Movie; Jonathan Dunn, Amiga).
- ZZAP!64 issue 76, August 1991: Terminator 2 preview. Issue 78, October 1991: “The Jolly Jon Dunn Music Player”.
- The One issue 42, March 1992: The Addams Family (music by Jonathan Dunn).
- Damien McFerran, “How RoboCop’s Epic Game Boy Theme Lives On More Than 30 Years Later”, Time Extension, 2 June 2020 (web, secondary): the college course, Argos, the piano in Preston, the Ariston advert, Lil B, his later career and Soularis. https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-how-robocops-epic-game-boy-theme-lives-on-more-than-30-years-later
- Video Game Music Preservation Foundation wiki, “Jonathan Dunn” (web, secondary): staying at Ocean through the Infogrames years until 2000. https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Jonathan_Dunn