Ocean Software
| Ocean Software Ltd. | |
 |
|
| Founded | 1984 |
| Closed | 1998 |
| Headquarters | Manchester, England |
Ocean Software Ltd., often referred to simply as Ocean, was a very influential British gaming company. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were one of the largest video game companies and published games on nearly every console and computer architecture of the time. Ocean was acquired by Infogrames in 1996 and restructured and renamed to Infogrames UK in 1998.
During their NES development, none of the games they developed had credits. This could have possibly been at the request of Nintendo. However, Painting by Numbers would put credits in their games most of the time, and Special FX Software would put their developers' initials in the high scores.
Contents
Games
Music Development
Amiga
The composers at Ocean used OctaMED, a tracker for the Amiga.
Commodore 64
On early tapes, Ocean used Novaload and its example song.
Julie Dunn, Martin Galway and Fred Gray always used their own drivers.
Peter Clarke and Jonathan Dunn have used Galway's driver. Gary Biasillo and Matthew Cannon tried to use it, too, but didn't understand it. So in 1988, Paul Hughes created Music Driver according to Biasillo's wants, and with Galway's 441.6 Hz. Jonathan Dunn developed it further, and Keith Tinman and Dean Evans used it as well.
Game Boy
Jonathan Dunn programmed the sound driver and composers would write their music in assembly.
American developer Left Field Productions used this sound driver. This is likely because Dunn also worked for the company.
Some games, like The Addams Family were composed by Mark Cooksey, who composed the music using Notator for the Atari ST.
NES
Jonathan Dunn created the sound driver and the music was written in hexadecimal. The driver was licensed to Special FX Software and Painting by Numbers for an undisclosed amount of money.
SNES
The music was made with MEdit. The instruments were from the Korg M1, Ensoniq EPS16 and Roland U-110.
Ocean's earliest SNES games used reprogrammed and repurposed version of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun driver, which, according to Dean Evans, was "awkward to use". Jonathan Dunn would later program a separate sound driver, used for the rest of Ocean's SNES games, and Bobby Earl developed a sound driver used in a few games.
Audio Personnel
- Barry Leitch - Composer and sound designer.
- Bobby Earl - Sound programmer for SNES.
- David Whittaker - Composer and sound designer.
- Dean Evans - Composer and sound designer.
- Fred Gray - Composer and sound designer.
- Gary Biasillo - Composer and foley artist.
- Jonathan Dunn - Composer and sound programmer.
- Julie Dunn - Composer (1984).
- Keith Tinman - Composer and sound designer.
- Mark Cooksey - Composer and sound designer (freelance).
- Martin Galway - Composer, sound designer and programmer (freelance 1984, full-time 1985–1987).
- Matthew Cannon - Composer and sound designer.
- Paul Hughes - Sound programmer.
- Peter Clarke - Composer and sound designer (full-time 1987).
Links
- mobygames.com/company/bandai-namco-entertainment-uk-ltd - MobyGames.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Software - Wikipedia.
