In the early 1990s, if an American or British publisher wanted a film licence or an arcade conversion on Sega’s consoles, the music very often came from one room in Rotherham. Matt Furniss was sixteen when he joined the conversion house Teque in 1989, and within four years he could tell CU Amiga that “just about anything you’ll hear on the Megadrive has come from here.” His credits run from Mortal Kombat and The Lion King to Puggsy and The Second Samurai, on the Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear, alongside a stack of Amiga games. His own count for the Master System alone was more than thirty.
Fast facts
- Born: 1973.
- Worked for: Teque and Krisalis Software, Rotherham, from 1989.
- Machines: Commodore 64, Amiga, Mega Drive, Master System, Game Gear and Mega-CD.
- Known for: music and sound effects for Western-made Sega console games, many of them written by Probe Software and published by Acclaim, US Gold, Virgin and others.
- Not his: Streets of Rage, whose music is by Yuzo Koshiro. Furniss has named it among his favourite Mega Drive soundtracks.
Rotherham, 1989
Furniss left school in 1989 and posted a demo tape of his Amiga music to developers around Britain. “Luckily for me Teque Software were looking for a sound designer,” he told Arcade Attack in 2019. He was paid “about £7,000. Not much money but as a sixteen-year-old fresh out of school I didn’t complain.” His first Commodore 64 music was typed in as source code for Teque’s in-house SID driver, using nothing more than a C64 and an Action Replay cartridge; he found it hard going and soon moved to a tracker-style system, which he used for Shadow Warriors, Space Harrier II and his later C64 games.
His accounts of which game came first differ. In 2015 he named Domark’s Toobin’ (1989) as the first game released with his music, and in 2019 the Amiga Laser Squad. In 1993 he told CU Amiga that “the tracks for Chase HQ for Ocean, Manchester United for Krisalis, and Laser Squad for Blade were all written at about the same time.”
The Amiga years
On the Amiga Furniss worked with a sampler, a hard drive and ProTracker, and composed straight on the machine: “I find it’s quicker and easier to do it that way.” He liked the sample quality and disliked the four channels, and he knew where the real contention lay. Programmers often wanted the blitter to draw the sprites, he explained, “so you’ve got the blitter and the sound chip both after the same bit of Chip memory”, and the soundtrack usually ended up with about 50K.
The magazines noticed. Computer and Video Games found his music for Krisalis’s puzzle game Revelation “very Countdown like” in March 1991. Reviewing the Amiga Ultima VI in August 1992, Amazing Computing wrote that “musician Matt Furniss should be congratulated for the Amiga version’s superlative sound and music.” AMIGA POWER credited him on OutRun Europa, Graham Taylor’s Soccer Challenge, Alien³, Arabian Nights and Soccer Kid, and The One reported that Psygnosis’s Innocent Until Caught would have “proper soundtrack ‘themes’ written by Matt Furniss”, one for each location and character. By February 1993 CU Amiga was calling him “one of the Amiga scene’s most prolific musicians”. Of his own soundtracks he rated Manchester United Europe and Cytron, for Psygnosis; the one that made him cringe was the “really cheesy tune, with some samples” for Domark’s James Bond game.
A sound system for Sega’s consoles
In 1991, Furniss recalled, Krisalis was already selling KASM, its own unofficial development kit for the Master System and Game Gear, and there was “new demand in the UK and USA for Master System game music”. With Krisalis’s technical director, Shaun Hollingworth, he built a music development program. His first Master System job was Probe’s SEGA Chess: three songs, for the title screen, winning and losing, which took him a couple of days. “From there I went on to create audio for a further 30 SEGA Master System games, such as Mortal Kombat, The Lion King, Alien3, Lemmings and The Terminator.”
The Mega Drive got the same treatment. Furniss wrote the music on an Atari Mega ST, and Hollingworth’s system sent it “in real-time to the Sega console, similar to a MIDI sequencer and synthesizer”, so he could hear exactly how it would sound in the game. Hollingworth, he said, “wrote most of the sound engines I used in the early years”. The Mega Drive, he wrote later, “had excellent sound hardware for its day. A six-channel stereo sound chip made by Yamaha, three channel PSG and a Z80 co-processor.” (The YM2612 entry explains the FM chip.) He already knew Yamaha’s FM chips from the PC’s AdLib and Sound Blaster cards, and his rule for drums was to “use samples for snares and kicks, FM for hats, toms, etc.” The Second Samurai, he said, was “very ‘FM.’ Lots of big sweeping synths and FM tricks.”
Much of the work was conversion, often done at a distance. If he was lucky, the developer sent an early version of the game by modem to Krisalis’s bulletin board and he ran it on his development system; for other projects he had “only a written description of the game delivered by fax”, and he posted the finished music back on floppy disk. He converted music by ear: OutRun Europa from Jeroen Tel’s Commodore 64 score to the Amiga and Sega’s 8-bit machines, and The Incredible Hulk from the Super NES version to the Sega consoles. “If I liked the original music, I’d convert it faithfully.” For US Gold’s Mega Drive Gunship he wrote original music, two songs for each level, taking his cue from its settings in the Middle East, Asia, South America and the Arctic.
Credits
The in-game credits and manuals transcribed by Sega Retro name Furniss on more than fifty Sega console releases. They include:
| Machine | Games |
|---|---|
| Mega Drive | Chuck Rock, Speedball 2 (1991), The Terminator, Alien³, T2: The Arcade Game, Galahad, European Club Soccer (1992), Mortal Kombat, G-LOC, Wolfchild, RoboCop 3, James Bond 007: The Duel, Gunship, The Lost Vikings, Puggsy, Wiz ‘n’ Liz (1993), Mortal Kombat II, The Second Samurai, Boogerman, The Lion King, Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, Mickey Mania (1994) |
| Master System and Game Gear | Back to the Future Part III, Prince of Persia, The Terminator, Smash T.V., Alien³, Chuck Rock (1992), RoboCop 3, Wolfchild (1993), Mortal Kombat II, The Lion King, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1994) |
Several of these, Mortal Kombat among them, were Probe Software conversions: Furniss worked for Krisalis and supplied the sound to other developers. None is a game from Sega’s own Japanese teams.
After Krisalis
Around 2001, Furniss told Sega-16, he “went into software engineering and web development full time”. By 2015 he was working for Sony Computer Entertainment America in southern California, on the team behind the cloud-gaming service Gaikai, which Sony turned into PlayStation Now. In 2019 he told Arcade Attack he worked in software design for a Californian tech start-up, and sang and played bass in a local covers band.
A different Matt Furniss, an artist, worked at Gremlin in Sheffield in the same years; the magazine credits for Gremlin’s The Legacy of Sorasil and Re-Loaded are his, not the composer’s.
Sources
- CU Amiga, February 1993, p. 122: Tony Horgan, “Matt Furniss up close” (three and a half years in the business; Chase HQ, Manchester United and Laser Squad; his hardware and software; Soccer Kid; Mega Drive work; four channels and Chip memory; Manchester United Europe, Cytron and the James Bond tune).
- CU Amiga, January 1993, p. 36: Soccer Kid feature (Furniss as Krisalis’s in-house musician).
- Computer and Video Games issue 110, January 1991, p. 22: reader’s letter praising Furniss’s music for Domark. Issue 112, March 1991, p. 85: Revelation review.
- AMIGA POWER issue 7, November 1991, p. 44: OutRun Europa review (credits). Issue 16, August 1992, p. 76: Graham Taylor’s Soccer Challenge. Issue 22, February 1993, p. 46: Alien³. Issue 25, May 1993, p. 32: Arabian Nights. Issue 29, September 1993, p. 28: Soccer Kid.
- Amazing Computing volume 7 issue 8, August 1992, p. 86: Jeff James, Ultima VI review.
- The One issue 57, June 1993, p. 46: Innocent Until Caught work in progress (the themes by Furniss). Issue 58, July 1993, p. 37: The Legacy of Sorasil credits (the Gremlin artist).
- Edge issue 34, July 1996, p. 72: Re-Loaded image “created by Gremlin artist Matt Furniss”.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 196–197: Furniss’s own account (Teque, salary, the SID driver, Toobin’, Hollingworth’s system, OutRun Europa, Gunship, The Incredible Hulk, the modem and fax, Sony and Gaikai).
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: A Visual Compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019), p. 156: Furniss on KASM, Hollingworth, SEGA Chess and his thirty further Master System games.
- Zebbe, “Interview: Matt Furniss (Composer)”, Sega-16, 20 April 2010 (web, secondary; his own words): starting at sixteen in 1989; the ST and SNASM system; AdLib and Sound Blaster; drums; converting faithfully; The Second Samurai; Hollingworth; software engineering from about 2001; Koshiro and Streets of Rage among his favourites. https://www.sega-16.com/2010/04/interview-matt-furniss/
- “Matt Furniss (VGM Extraordinaire)”, Arcade Attack, 9 August 2019 (web, secondary; his own words): the demo tape, Teque, Laser Squad, his work in 2019. https://www.arcadeattack.co.uk/matt-furniss/
- Sega Retro, “Matt Furniss” (web, secondary): the list of credits, each referenced to the game’s in-game credits or manual. https://segaretro.org/Matt_Furniss