BARRY LEITCH Barry’s fascinating career as a composer has taken him from a computer club in Scotland to an orchestral concert in Brazil, working with some of the top games companies on both sides of the Atlantic Words by Andrew Fisher
“I’ve moved like 33 times since I left home,” Barry tells us from his studio in Ohio, his Scottish accent revealing hints of an American twang. We ask if he had any musical training. “No, other than learning to play the recorder in school. In the end, they wouldn’t let me take my music O Level because I couldn’t play an instrument well enough. I was always interested in music but I was just too damn lazy to learn how to play the piano properly.” Instead, he became interested in computers, his earliest experience typing in listings and trying to make games on a ZX81. “Playing Flight Simulator on the ZX81 – ‘Oh my God, it’s so real!’”
» Barry (top left) next to Rob Hubbard in a stellar line-up of C64
composers during Back In Time Brighton 2003. (Photo by Andrew Fisher)
92 | RETRO GAMER
What was it that made you start writing music on computers? When I heard Rob Hubbard’s Synth Sample demo, it was like, ‘People are making music on these machines that sounds really good!’ I borrowed a BBC Model B over the summer and programmed a bunch of music into The Music System. If you ever run into a copy of Toccata in D Minor in The Music System, that was five days of my life, putting that in note by note. How did you get your first commercial gig? I was 14 or 15 and I started making demos. We were in the Compunet era, just going to computer clubs every week and swapping our demos. If you had some new demos, people would give you games and demos in exchange. I sent tons of demos to every videogame company in Britain and pestered them all, and they all said, ‘No kid, we don’t want your music, stop calling us.’ So I made more demos and sent them off, phoned them up again and said, ‘You should really check out my new demos, they are much better than the old ones.’ And finally Colin Fuige at Firebird said, ‘That one tune… I think we can use that one.’ Yes! I was an annoying little 15-year-old and I wanted to make music for games more than anything in the world, because it was that or go and do a real job – doctor, lawyer, accountant… ugh, I didn’t want to do any of that shit. I wanted to be Rob Hubbard. It took a long time before I got better – a good five years, just writing music every day before I had that ‘aha!’ moment, that this works and this doesn’t. How did you join Imagitec? We’d been at Catalyst Coders in Portsmouth, and they had severe financial difficulties. We were living on one Pot Noodle a day because we were so poor. We hooked up with Darren Melbourne,
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[SNES] Barry ready! Gladiators ready! Start jousting. Barry handled the music for American Gladiators.
and he was trying to swing a deal where we’d set up a little studio in conjunction with Imagitec. And they were like, ‘You can come work in-house but we’re not wasting money on an office.’ Darren was geographically tied to London, I don’t think he wanted to move up north to Dewsbury. We’d all left Portsmouth and were living in a bedsit in London, which was rented out by these gangsters – you don’t pay the rent, you get concrete wellies. It was terrifying for 17 or 18-year-olds. I’d managed to do some freelance jobs, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer and Super Dragon Slayer. We had a few hundred quid come in, just enough to pay the rent for another couple of weeks. We were down to eating dry cornflakes. There was me and my girlfriend, the late Chris Edwards (the artist), Tom Pinnock