Tim Follin's Greatest Hits

Tim Follin belongs in that categoryof composers such as Jerry Goldsmith whereby their name is bigger than the media they've created music for. He is very much like Jerry Goldsmith in many ways, where Goldsmith bridged the gap between the old Hollywood sound to modern film scoring, Follin elevated video game music beyond simple bleeps and bloops. What he did for the SNES game Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge was so advanced you could easily mistaken the music as coming from a CD-based system or computer. And fuck, did he make that Mega Drive soundchip sing with Time Trax. It was sex. Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo take the most plaudits in vgm's development but Tim Follin was the man who experimented and tried to help it attain the levels of sophistication and depth found in music such as progressive rock in its early stages. It's not quite there but no one can knock him for not trying. He helped mould and establish video game music's identity as recognisable and separate from other genres. But more importantly as relevant.

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