Awesome Music/Tim and Geoff Follin


 * Ghouls n Ghosts. THIS was the game that cemented Tim Follin's status as the Commodore 64 music legend.
 * Body Slam has a very catchy bass hook, courtesy of Tim.
 * The Silver Surfer game for NES was notoriously awful. Its soundtrack, on the other hand, was composed by Commodore 64 music legend Tim Follin, and was deserving of a far better game.
 * And the Treasure Master soundtrack by the same composer.
 * Tim's work on the NES title Target: Renegade is stellar, and quite complex for the time.
 * One rumor states that Shigeru Miyamoto heard Plok's opening theme and couldn't believe it was coming out of an unmodified SNES.
 * Gotta give some credit to the rest of the soundtrack as well. A trick Follin used in some of his SNES tracks was to take chords and use them as samples, in order to fit more notes into a single channel. Apart from the title theme, Plok's entire soundtrack only uses up five of a possible eight sound channels, meaning that the sound can do whatever it wants in the other three without cutting into the music. It's worth pulling the channels apart in an emulator to see how this stuff's done.
 * Other great songs are: Venge Thicket and Beach
 * Creepy Crag
 * Cotton Island


 * Spider-Man and the X-Men for SNES was a notoriously bad licensed game filled with leaps of faith and terrible enemy AI. Given that description, you wouldn't expect the opening theme to rock this much. Perhaps not surprising, though, given that it was developed by the same team as Silver Surfer, with Tim Follin once again doing the music.
 * Rock & Roll Racing. In most circumstances, Real Song Theme Tunes covered on the SNES would be a disaster, but given that Tim Follin programmed this soundtrack...
 * Ken Griffey Jr.'s Major League Baseball deserves special notice for being a first-party Nintendo title with music by Tim Follin. (Ironically enough, it was never released in Follin's own homeland-- baseball's not all that popular in England...)
 * Solstice, and its SNES sequel Equinox.
 * The title theme from Solstice. Its just too good!
 * Super Off Road for SNES, one of the Follins' earlier SNES soundtracks, still manages to push the sound chip to its limits even in its first couple years.
 * Time Trax contained Follin's only soundtrack for the Sega Megadrive. Unfortunately the game was never released.
 * Wolverine for NES. Yet another unplayably hard Marvel Comics licensed game with a soundtrack so much better than the game itself, this time by Tim Follin's brother Geoff.
 * Both of the Follins composed the soundtrack for Kiwi Kraze (a port of the Taito arcade game The New Zealand Story) for the NES, once again proving their mastery of the NES sound chip. Your Mileage May Vary as to the port's quality, but at least the music is rockin'.
 * Geoff even did freakin' Thomas the Tank Engine, both for SNES and an unreleased NES version.
 * Spot: The Video Game for the Game Boy (not to be confused with Cool Spot). This is the music that plays as you make your move.
 * Terminator 2 for the NES continues the tradition of good Follin tunes, with the High Octane Nightmare Fuel-inducing Asylum theme.
 * One of the few really rare examples of Follin brothers giving an A+ soundtrack to a good game (a licensed game, moreover; cos' it should be noted that not all licensed games are bad), apart from Rock 'n Roll Racing listed above, is Tom & Jerry (and Tuffy). Technically, it's nothing else than a poppuri made of the score of Puss Gets the Boot episode, but, oddly enough, it fits the game like nothing else.
 * As well as the familiar 3-channel square wave output which should be familiar to any 8-bit veterans, the ZX Spectrum also had a 1-bit piezo speaker built into the hardware. Using some specially coded drivers, and some insidious form of witchcraft, Mr Follin was entirely capable of churning out some surprisingly complex multichannel pieces, such as those heard in Future Games, Chronos, and Raw Recruit
 * As well as the familiar 3-channel square wave output which should be familiar to any 8-bit veterans, the ZX Spectrum also had a 1-bit piezo speaker built into the hardware. Using some specially coded drivers, and some insidious form of witchcraft, Mr Follin was entirely capable of churning out some surprisingly complex multichannel pieces, such as those heard in Future Games, Chronos, and Raw Recruit