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Purple Motion

Jonne Valtonen: Future Crew's musician, later an orchestral arranger and composer

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Purple Motion (Jonne Valtonen) joined Future Crew as a teenager in 1991 and wrote most of the music for Second Reality. He scored Remedy's first game, Death Rally, studied composition, and became the arranger behind the orchestral game-music concerts Symphonic Shades, Symphonic Fantasies and Final Symphony.

Jonne Valtonen was 14 or 15 when he joined Future Crew, and he did not exactly apply. He had been beta-testing the group’s music editor, Scream Tracker, and wrote a tune for its next intro. “When I got the intro, I noticed that I was listed as a member of their group, so no fanfares there.” Two years later, as Purple Motion, he wrote most of the music for Second Reality. By 2009 an orchestra in Cologne was playing his arrangements of Japanese game music, with the games’ composers there as guests.

Fast facts

  • Real name: Jonne Valtonen, born 1976.
  • Group: Future Crew, from 1991.
  • Handle: from the rock band Deep Purple, “and since two-word handles were pretty pop then, I just added ‘Motion’ to describe my music.”
  • Demo music: most of Second Reality (1993); “Sundance”, winner of the four-channel music competition at Assembly ’93; the music disk Journey (1993).
  • Games: Death Rally (1996), Remedy Entertainment’s first game.
  • Later: arranger and orchestrator for Symphonic Shades (2008), Symphonic Fantasies (2009) and Final Symphony (2013); composer for concert, theatre and film.

Joining Future Crew

Future Crew’s READ.ME for Second Reality and its information file of October 1993 list “Purple Motion, Jonne Valtonen, 17, Musician”, the youngest member. He told the scene magazine Hugi in 1999 how he got in: “I knew PSI’s little brother. With twists and other weirdnesses I ended up betatesting Scream Tracker 2. They (well, PSI) asked me for music for their upcoming intro ‘mental surgery’, and I made one tune for that.” Mental Surgery came out in the summer of 1991, and the group’s history lists Purple Motion among its four members at that time. He had started writing music only a year or so earlier, and lost much of it when “my computer then had a faulty harddisk, which trashed loads of my mods”. He had also been playing classical piano for years.

Second Reality and Journey

Second Reality’s credit screens put his name on the music of most of the demo’s parts. Skaven has the first three screens and one other. At Assembly ’93, where the demo won, Purple Motion’s “Sundance” won the four-channel music competition, and his “Starshine” was placed in the multichannel competition that Skaven’s “Ice Frontier” won.

At The Party in Denmark that December Future Crew released his music disk Journey, which came with the group’s own module player for Sound Blaster and Gravis UltraSound cards. British public-domain libraries were selling it by the autumn of 1994 as “JOURNEY (2) — Music collection by Purple Motion”.

Games and a studio

His music was in Remedy Entertainment’s first game, the car-combat racer Death Rally (1996). An Italian reader writing to the magazine Zeta in February 1997 pointed it out as a game “che ha la musica fatta dal massimo della Scena, Purple Motion dei Future Crew”: with music by the best the scene had. He told Hugi in 1999 that he had contributed to the music of Final Reality, Remedy’s 3D benchmark, and that he now had “my own studio and company”. He was writing music for a production of Dracula at his local theatre, and working on a CD of his own. By then he had moved largely from trackers to MIDI synthesisers: “It takes a bit more time to work on a MIDI tune than with trackers, but the quality is much better.”

Composer and arranger

Valtonen graduated in classical composition from the Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK) in 2009. By then he was already working with Merregnon Studios, the company through which the German producer Thomas Böcker staged orchestral concerts of video-game music. The booklet of Musica e WCCF Secondo Movimento, a 2008 album of Sega’s football-game music recorded by the FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague, credits “Music arranged and orchestrated by: Jonne Valtonen (Merregnon Studios)”.

He was the lead arranger of Symphonic Shades, the concert of Chris Huelsbeck’s music that the WDR Radio Orchestra Cologne played on 23 August 2008. For Symphonic Fantasies in September 2009, music from Square Enix’s Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Secret of Mana and Chrono games, he wrote the arrangements with Roger Wanamo, and the premiere at Cologne’s Philharmonic Hall had the games’ composers, among them Nobuo Uematsu and Yoko Shimomura, as guests. Final Symphony, first played by the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra in May 2013, included his own “Fantasy Overture – Circle within a Circle within a Circle” and his arrangement of Final Fantasy VII as a symphony in three movements.

His own compositions have gone further from games. In the spring of 2019 the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra premiered his 100-minute score for Mauritz Stiller’s 1919 silent film Song of the Scarlet Flower, and his soundtrack for the online game Albion Online won first prize at the Game Audio Awards in 2018. “Becoming a composer takes a long time, perhaps ten to thirty years,” he told the Tampere universities’ news service in 2019.

He has not left the scene behind. In 2024 his music was on Superselection, a demo released under Future Crew’s name with the groups Byterapers and Doomsday, which came second at Assembly Summer 2024.

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