Frank Klepacki
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Frank Klepacki is an American video game musician. He was born on May 25, 1974 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Klepacki started out musically at age 8 when he received a drumset. By age 11, he learned to play drums professionally. He had tried to form bands but couldn't work well with them on original content. Klepacki ended up getting into programming and learned BASIC for the Tandy 1000 computer. He then saw an ad for Westwood Studios looking for game testers, in which he applied at. When Klepacki was testing games for Westwood, he gave Paul Mudra, Westwood's audio director recordings of his songs. Mudra and Westwood were impressed by his work and Klepacki started working at Westwood at the age of 17 in 1991, just before his senior year in high school. The first game Klepacki worked on was DragonStrike for the NES, and was shortly after given the task of composing the music to Eye of the Beholder II. Making music for DOS games was difficult because Klepacki had to use AdLib Visual Composer, a very limited piece of music software. However, despite the program's limitations and Klepacki's young age, he pushed the program to its limit, creating high-quality orchestral scores for the game and other games such as Dune and Lands of Lore. Around this time, Klepacki began to serve as the company's lead composer, and their other audio staff Dwight Okahara and Paul Mudra started to do less musical work for them and instead served as sound designers and audio directors.
Some of Klepacki's best known soundtracks include the Command & Conquer and Dune series. When Westwood was dissolved by Electronic Arts, Klepacki, along with most of the original Westwood employees, left to form their own company, Petroglyph.
Klepacki is also involved in the film industry making soundtracks for movies and television shows and has released a few albums of his solo work.
Contents
Audio Development
DOS
Klepacki said this about the Eye of the Beholder II soundtrack:
According to Klepacki, Visual Composer was used to compose all of his MS-DOS music. Despite Klepacki's age and the program's limitations, he pushed the program to its limits. The instruments were created by Paul Mudra, and his compositions were converted to the ADL (Westwood) format.
GEN
Klepacki said this about his Genesis music, mainly for Warriors of the Eternal Sun:
Music was composed in AdLib Visual Composer (DOS) and then converted to GEMS.
NES
Klepacki said this about DragonStrike, the only NES game he worked on:
Klepacki used Dr. T's KCS, which was implemented into a driver that was programmed by Paul Mudra.
SNES
For Young Merlin, he wrote MIDI files, which was converted into sheet music, then the team at Chip Level Designs converted the sheet music into assembly, using Chip Level Designs' version of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun driver.
For The Lion King, he wrote MIDI files, which was converted to the SLICK/Audio sound driver from Bitmasters.
TG16
Klepacki on composing Order of the Griffon, the only TG16 he and Westwood worked on:
Klepacki used AdLib Visual Composer which was converted to a TurboGrafx-16 sound driver.
W32
Klepacki used Cubase 6.
Gameography
Links
- frankklepacki.com - Official.
- youtube.com/user/flyrecords1 - YouTube.
- youtu.be/ym7NilMAwVA?t=4m24s - Video Interview.
- facebook.com/frankklepacki - Facebook.
- twitter.com/FrankKlepacki - Twitter.
