Barry Leitch
Barry Leitch (born April 27, 1970 in Strathaven, Scotland) is a Scottish video game music composer (brother David Leitch), responsible for the music in a large number of games spanning multiple consoles and personal computers. Most notable is his work from the Lotus Turbo Challenge, Top Gear, and Rush video game series.
Career
Starting in 1986 with I.C.U.P.S. on the Commodore 64 when he was 16 years old, Barry has since composed soundtracks for hundreds of video games and toys.
After the independently produced Marauder for the C64, Barry Joined Catalyst Coders in Portsmouth, and moved onto Imagitec Design and then Ocean software. During those years he wrote the music for many iconic 16-bit games. While at Imagitec he often worked on many Gremlin Graphics products. His works from these periods include Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Space Crusade, Xenophobe, Emlyn Hughes International Soccer, Silkworm and the Super Cars II in game music.
Later he scored such games as Privateer - Righteous Fire, TFX & Inferno (co-composed with Alien Sex Fiend) on the PC, Top Gear, Savage Empire and even Wheel of Fortune on the SNES.
After moving to the USA in 1993 to join Origin Systems, Barry moved to Boss Game Studios in Seattle, composing the soundtrack for Spider: The Video Game for the Sony PlayStation, and Top Gear Rally for the Nintendo 64. The title track from Kill Team, "Hatred" (a canceled Boss game) was played on local radio.
In 1998 Barry Joined Atari Games in Milpitas, working with video game legends such as Ed Logg & Mark Pierce composing the soundtrack for Nintendo 64 classics Rush2, Rush 2049, as well as Gauntlet Legends, and contributing to Gauntlet Dark Legacy and Rush 2049 Tournament Edition for arcade machines.
In 2000 he joined Fisher-Price toys in East Aurora, NY. Pushing toy designers to implement technologies that were new to the toy industry but old to the video game industry. Scoring the soundtracks for product lines such as Ocean Wonders, Pixter, Sparkling Symphony and Kasey The Kinderbot. Pixter Pro was given a Game Audio Network Guild Award for its soundtrack.
Since 2004 Barry has been freelancing, and has racked up credits on several video game titles as well as many toy projects, Video game credits include Batman - Rise of Sin Tzu, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, Lemonade Tycoon 2, Bonnie's Bookstore, Velvet Assassin, Drakensang and Horizon Chase
External links
- Official site
- Composer profile at OverClocked ReMix
- Barry Leitch at the Internet Movie Database
- Amiga Music Preservation Archive
- Modland Nintendo SPC archive
- Stone Oakvalley's Authentic Sid Collection
- Pixter Gang Award coverage on Gamasutra