Matt Furniss Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs Soundtrack (Sega Master System)

Battletoads in Battlemaniacs Soundtrack (Sega Master System), Matt Furniss / David Wise, 1994

There aren’t a lot of Sega Master System ports of SNES games. There are even fewer ports where the Master System soundtrack improves on the SNES original. And if that score emerges from what was an unfinished release, we might be dealing with a minor miracle. Or maybe such a lucky outcome wasn’t entirely unpredictable. After all, it was Matt Furniss (working with Shaun Hollingworth under the Krisalis moniker) who ported the Battletoads in Battlemaniacs SNES score.

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Galahad Soundtrack

Galahad Soundtrack, Matt Furniss, 1992

It probably didn’t sway many customers towards buying a Sega Genesis, but one advantage that the platform had over the SNES was a reasonably steady flow of European computer game ports – particularly from the Amiga. That was undoubtedly due to the Genesis outselling the SNES on the continent, making ports a potentially lucrative undertaking. However, few – if any – of these conversions are particularly well-remembered these days. Mind you, that’s not necessarily due to a lack of quality, which means there are some hidden gems to be unearthed. Enter Galahad, previously released as Leander on the Amiga. While the game – a medieval-themed hack’n’slash platformer – didn’t do anything drastically original to stand out from the crowd, it was a prime example of a rock-solid title that still entertains decades later: substantial content, tight controls, lovely graphics – and one of the platform’s greatest soundtracks.

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Matt Furniss – Atari ST Works

Matt Furniss – Atari ST Works, 1990-1992

Many computer game soundtracks of the 80s and early 90s consist of only one longer cue, sometimes with a few shorter pieces and jingles added. As such, these scores don’t warrant individual reviews, even when these works are of outstanding quality. What makes more sense is to combine several such soundtracks by a single composer into one review.

Part of the ecosystem of European (and particularly British) home computers was that games were usually released across a range of platforms, including the C64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, PC, Amstrad CPC and Acorn 32-bit – obviously to increase presence in the marketplace and thus sales. Due to the technological differences between all of these systems, they would also feature different soundtracks – or rather one score ported and adapted to each platform. That was the situation developer Krisalis Software (previously trading as Teque Software Development) and their in-house composer Matt Furniss found themselves in during the late 80s and early 90s.

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Puggsy Soundtrack (Sega Genesis)

Puggsy Soundtrack (Sega Genesis), Matt Furniss, 1993

At first glance, Puggsy might have looked like yet another early-90s mascot platformer, difficult to distinguish from the glut of similar titles flooding the SNES and Sega Genesis at the time. However, Puggsy and the story of how it came to be was actually far more intriguing than that. The Puggsy character originated in a 1990 Amiga demo called Puggs in Space, designed by demogroup Dionysus, which included future game music maestro Tim Wright. After signing with Psygnosis, Dionysus was pulled out of the game’s development, which went to Traveller’s Tales. Similarly, Puggsy’s gameplay hid a few unexpected intricacies. The title heavily featured puzzles based on a physics engine – an innovative feature for a 16-bit platform. Individual objects had different properties such as buoyancy, weight and friction, allowing for more intricate puzzles than most other platformers of the era managed.

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Sabre Team Soundtrack (Atari ST)

Sabre Team Soundtrack (Atari ST), Matt Furniss, 1992

During the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s, video games starring burly soldiers defending the Western way of life were a dime a dozen (we can at least partially thank Rambo: First Blood Part II and the following wave of copycat movies for that). By 1992, the formula required a bit of tweaking to still elicit interest, and so Krisalis Software made the smart move to turn Sabre Team into a turn-based strategy simulation. Gamers put together a team of four elite soldiers, making the most of limited action points per unit to move them around the isometric maps and attack enemies. Details like the amount of noise produced by different weapons and the weight of their respective ammunition added a surprising amount of realism to the gameplay, turning Sabre Team into one of the Atari ST’s best strategy games.

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T2: The Arcade Game Soundtrack (Sega Genesis)

T2: The Arcade Game Soundtrack (Sega Genesis), Matt Furniss, 1993

Game developers certainly didn’t pass up the opportunity to make the most of the blockbuster juggernaut that was Terminator 2: Judgment Day. At the time the third-highest grossing movie worldwide (behind Star Wars and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), James Cameron’s work prompted numerous video game adaptations. In fact, when Midway ported their arcade rail shooter Terminator 2: Judgment Day to home consoles, they had to change its name to T2: The Arcade Game, to differentiate it from the already existing T2 games. That didn’t stop Midway Manufacturing Company from porting the game to as many platforms as possible – even to those that don’t seem like obvious candidates for a rail shooter (the Game Boy?)

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