Mark Knight, also known as TDK and Madfiddler, is a British musician, video game music composer and sound designer. He started out writing chiptune and module file music in the Amiga demoscene,^[1] and began his games industry career as a composer in 1992. He continued until 2000 when he moved to sound design, and since 2014 has had a split role as a sound designer and composer culminating by going self employed in 2017.

Biography

Born in 1973, in Brighton,^[2] East Sussex in England, his grandfather started teaching him the violin when he was 6. At 10 years old he was given a Commodore 64 home computer and took an interest in electronic music. Whilst studying in college he began writing music on the Amiga, releasing music within the demoscene. Having been refused a university place to study Music Production in 1992, he was given the opportunity to arrange the Wing Commander soundtrack to the Amiga home computer which led him to full-time employment with the developer Mindscape.^[3]

Having left Mindscape in 1997, Knight wrote the soundtrack for Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown before accepting a position at Bullfrog Productions, a development company owned by Electronic Arts, working on games such as Dungeon Keeper 2, Populous: The Beginning and Theme Park World – which won a BAFTA for Best Sound.^[4]

In 2000, Mark changed career direction and lead the sound design team on the EA Sports F1 series, stating that "If truth be told however, it was a simple choice of either F1 or Harry Potter".^[5] He left EA in 2003, and after spending time at Visual Science he joined Codemasters in 2007 working on their DiRT, F1 and GRID franchises.^[3]

Knight has performed on the electric violin with the folk punk band Tricks Upon Travellers (1994–2000), K-Passa (2000–2001, 2008–present), Blue Horses (2002–2003), 4-4-2 (2004), Laura Kenny (2006), Silver Dogs (2006–2007), Bleeding Hearts (2009–2011) and has worked as a session musician for bands such as Pepe Deluxé,^[6] The Divine Comedy,^[7] C64 Audio.com, and Frost*. He also administers the Fiddle and Alternative Strings Forum.

In 2012 Knight released his first TDK chiptune album, and continues to compose music in this style and in 2015 Knight announced his return to video game composition with F1 2015.^[8] He was nominated for Best Western Game Composer (2015) at the Annual Game Music Awards.^[9]

Knight resigned from Codemasters in September 2017 and is now running his Audio Production company, SONiC FUEL.

He contributed demo-music and patches to the Commodore 64 SID chip emulator, inSIDious, from Impact Soundworks in 2020 ^[10] and in 2021 he returned to the demoscene by contributing the music for the Melon Design demo, Cortez.

Personal life

Knight lives in Warwickshire, England.

Discography

References

External links

• Mark Knight at IMDb
• Mark Knight discography at Discogs
• TDK website
• SONiC FUEL website
• madfiddler website
• Gamesounds website Archived 22 January 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• AMP profile website