Stephane Picq

Stéphane Picq

Born	1965-08-16
Birth Place	Rouen, France
Nationality	French
Died	2025-02-03
Aliases	S. P. S. Picq Pick Exxos

Stéphane Picq was a French composer and sound designer who mainly worked for ERE Informatique/Exxos and Cryo Interactive. Some of his most famous video game soundtracks include Dune and MegaRace.

Picq started coding video games in 1983 on the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. Initially, he wrote music as a hobby, playing electric piano and analog synth. To make money, he ported games to different systems including the Amiga. When porting over the Amiga, often times the initial version of the game barely had any sounds nor music, so he started to add music and sounds to the game using tracker software. The company he was working for at the time, ERE Informatique asked him to write music for other peoples games and soon became exclusively a music programmer. During this period, he also wrote music for ERE's label, "Exxos".

When ERE Informatique was bought by Infogrames, several of the Exxos team members were laid off and subsequently formed Cryo Interactive Entertainment. The Cryo team went over to publisher Virgin Games, where they obtained the license to create a video game based off the best selling sci-fi novel, Dune. Working with programmer and Cryo co-founder, Remi Herbulot, he came up with HERAD, a music tool for the FM soundcard AdLib, which allowed the music written for the FM chip to be more expressive and to achieve more unique sounds. Using the HERAD system, Picq wrote the soundtrack to Dune, which has been critically praised as being one of the best soundtracks for DOS games. Philippe Ulrich, the art director on Dune was such a big fan of Picq's soundtrack, he convinced Virgin Records to release a CD album for the game. Both Picq and Ulrich reworked several tracks from the game and re-recorded them using professional instruments. Again, all instruments were performed live and many of the samples used were recorded by Picq personally, utilizing very little presets or sample libraries.

Growing tired with the video game industry, he left France in 1998 and moved to Ramena Beach, Madagascar, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was briefly attached to a planned reboot of MegaRace but the game has been stuck in development hell since 2015. In his final years he split his time between working in the precious stone business, selling star sapphires and designing jewels, and managing a recording studio.

Picq passed away on February 3, 2025, after a long battle with an undisclosed illness.

Audio Development

Amiga

Picq has used The Ultimate Soundtracker.

DOS

For Cryo's first three games, he and Remi Herbulot designed the HERAD system, which allowed for more expressive music to play on the AdLib/Sound Blaster OPL FM chip. For writing MegaRace's music, Picq used Cubase Score.

Gameography

Released	Title	Sample	Notes
1984-??-??	Lombrix (ZXS)
1985-??-??	Captain Blood (ZXS)
1989-??-??	Purple Saturn Day (ZXS)
1988-0?-??	Bubble Ghost (AMI)
1988-??-??	Wanted (AMI)
1989-??-??	Purple Saturn Day (AMI)
1990-??-??	Chamber Of The Sci-Mutant Priestess (AMI)
1990-??-??	Extase (AMI)
1990-??-??	Jumping Jack'Son (AMI)
1990-??-??	Mystical (AMI)
1992-??-??	Dune (DOS)
1992-??-??	KGB (DOS)
1993-??-??	Dune (SCD)
1993-??-??	MegaRace (DOS)
1994-??-??	MegaRace (3DO)
1994-??-??	MegaRace (SCD)
1995-??-??	Lost Eden (DOS)