Hans Florian Zimmer is a German film score composer and music producer. He has won two Oscars, four Grammys, and has been nominated for three Emmys and a Tony. Zimmer was also named on the list of Top 100 Living Geniuses, published by The Daily Telegraph in 2007.
Yasunori Mitsuda is a Japanese composer and musician. He is best known for his work in video games, primarily for the Chrono, Xeno, Shadow Hearts, and Inazuma Eleven franchises, among various others. Mitsuda began composing music for his own games in high school, later attending a music college in Tokyo. While still a student, he was granted an intern position at the game development studio Wolf Team.
Koji Kondo is a Japanese composer and senior executive at the video game company Nintendo. He is best known for his contributions for the Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda series, with his Super Mario Bros. theme being the first piece of music from a video game included in the American National Recording Registry. Kondo was hired by Nintendo in 1984 as their first dedicated composer and is currently a Senior Officer at their Entertainment Planning & Development division.
Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka, also known as Chip Tanaka, is a Japanese musician, composer, sound designer, and executive who pioneered chiptune music. He is best known as one of Nintendo's in-house composers during the 8- and 16-bit era of video games. Tanaka also had a role in designing and programming the Famicom and Game Boy audio hardware, along with the NES Zapper, Game Boy Camera, and Game Boy Printer.
Origin Systems, Inc. was an American video game developer based in Austin, Texas. It was founded on March 3, 1983, by Richard Garriott and his brother Robert. Origin is best known for their groundbreaking work in multiple genres of video games, such as the Ultima and Wing Commander series. The company was purchased by Electronic Arts in 1992.
Rob Hubbard is a British composer best known for his musical and programming work for microcomputers of the 1980s, such as the Commodore 64.
Timothy John Follin is an English video game music composer, cinematographer, visual effects artist and game developer, who has written tracks for a variety of titles and home gaming systems, including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, Nintendo Entertainment System, Mega Drive, Super NES, Game Boy, Dreamcast, and PlayStation.
Hitoshi Sakimoto is a Japanese composer and sound producer. He is best known for scoring the video games Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII, though he has composed soundtracks for numerous other games. Sakimoto first played music and video games in elementary school and began composing music professionally in 1988. He worked at the video game company Square from 1998 to 2000, before founding the music and sound production company Basiscape in 2002.
David Peter Gray is a British singer-songwriter. Having released his debut album in 1993, he received worldwide attention with White Ladder five years later, particularly for the hit single "Babylon". White Ladder was the first of three chart-toppers in six years for Gray in the UK, where it became the fifth best-selling album of the 2000s. In 2019, it was ranked as the UK's tenth best-selling album of the 21st century. David Gray reached the US Top 20 with five successive albums, and has received four Brit Award nominations, including two nominations for Best British Male.
David Wise is a British video game music composer and musician. He was a composer at Rare from 1985 to 2009, and he was the company's sole musician up until 1994. He has gained a dedicated following for his work on various games, particularly Nintendo's Donkey Kong Country series. Wise is known for his atmospheric style of music, mixing natural environmental sounds with prominent melodic and percussive accompaniment.
Yuzo Koshiro is a Japanese composer and sound programmer. He is often regarded as one of the most influential innovators in chiptune and video game music, producing music in a number of genres including rock, jazz, symphonic, and various electronic genres such as house, electro, techno, trance, and hip hop.
Jeroen Godfried Tel, also known as WAVE, is a Dutch composer. He is best known for numerous computer game tunes he wrote in the 1980s and early 1990s for the Commodore 64. His most popular compositions appear in the following Commodore 64 games: Combat Crazy, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II, Dan Dare 3, Eliminator, Hawkeye, Myth: History in the Making, Nighthunter, Robocop 3, Rubicon, and Supremacy.
Nick Didkovsky is a composer, guitarist, computer music programmer, and leader of the band Doctor Nerve. He is a former student of Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros and Gerald Shapiro.
Fereydun Robert Armisen is an American actor, comedian, musician, and writer. With his comedy partner Carrie Brownstein, he co-created and co-starred in the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia. He also co-created and starred in the mockumentary IFC series Documentary Now! and the Showtime comedy series Moonbase 8.
Carl Stone is an American composer, primarily working in the field of live electronic music. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East.
Jesper Kyd Jakobson is a Danish composer and sound designer who has worked on various video game, television, and film projects. He has composed soundtracks for the Hitman series, Assassin's Creed series, Borderlands series, Darksiders II and State of Decay, among many others. His scores use orchestra, choir, acoustic manipulations and electronic soundscapes.
Glenn Kotche is an American drummer and composer, best known for his involvement in the band Wilco. He was named the 40th greatest drummer of all time by Gigwise in 2008.
Nathan McCree is an English music composer and sound effects editor for multimedia projects including computer games, television, live events, and radio. He worked with Core Design between 1996 and 1998, for the first three Tomb Raider games, among others. He worked also with high-profile names such as the Spice Girls and Orange. In 2008, he became full-time Audio Director for Vatra Games where he worked until 2010. After this, he became Audio Director at City Interactive in Warsaw where he worked on Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 and Alien Rage. McCree then went freelance and set up his own studio in Brno, Czech Republic.
Kevin Riepl is an American composer for video games, films and television shows. He is best known for his work on the Unreal series of games as well as Gears of War and Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Keiichi Okabe is a Japanese composer and arranger, best known for composing music for the Tekken and Drakengard series. He started his career at Namco in 1994, where he primarily composed for arcade games. Outside of video games, he has composed for anime series such as Working!! and Yuki Yuna is a Hero, along with arranging tracks for J-pop artists. He established the music production studio Monaca in 2004, which composes for various types of media.
