MAGFest 09: composer Tommy Tallarico talks about his worst game ever

“I’ve worked on some sh*tty-assed games,” said game music composer Tommy Tallarico.

Tallarico attended game festival MAGFest this past weekend, hosting both a panel on game music composition as well as a more personal one, which focused on his background and beginnings in the games industry. In this panel, he detailed some of his favorite projects from his successful career, but made it a point to mention his least favorite.

“When I started, game audio was the last thing people thought of,” said Tallarico, speaking on the low quality of early game soundtracks.

He feels that the worst game he’s worked on was called Color-A-Dinosaur, for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

“This is exactly what happened: the vice-president of the company came to the office, and I had never worked on the NES.”

“He walked into my office and said ‘okay, look, we’ve got this game called Color-A- Dinosaur, and it’s this dinosaur coloring game. We’re submitting it tomorrow, and FedEx leaves at 4 o’clock tomorrow, and we don’t have any sound in it. See what you can do.'”

Tallarico continued, “I’ve never worked on the platform before.”

“How do I make sounds for it?” he asked.

“The VP says ‘I don’t know, there’s this sound driver thing. See if you can figure it out.'”

“I literally stayed up all night; I wrote these two songs and a bunch of shitty sound effects.”

Tallarico admits, “It was my worst work ever.”