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David Whittaker

David Whittaker (born 24 April 1957, Bury, England) is known for numerous computer game tunes which he wrote in most of the 1980s and early 1990s, for many different formats.

He is known for the large quantity of his works—more than any other composer (in fact, more than most of the other top composers' works combined). He was offered so many projects in the late 1980s that he had to pass some of them over to other computer game music writers (such as his good friends, Rob Hubbard and Ben Daglish). Initially, he had been a programmer, rather than a music maker. The first games that featured his music were also designed and programmed by him, such as Lazy Jones.

While making music, he often programmed music directly, instead of using any music composition tools, using just a "machine code monitor"—and then an 'assembler' system/program—including SuperSoft's and then Commodore's tools. Commodore 64 was the format that he composed for most frequently. He was more impressed with the Amiga's more developed technical sound capabilities, but used a few of the same instrument sounds, in several of his works, for Amiga. Thus, his Amiga music is often easy to recognise. For Shadow of the Beast, he was asked to compose especially good music, as much more memory was available for that game—so he used different and very high quality (at the time) instrument samples. These days he works mostly in the field of computer game sound effects and voices rather than music.

Alien Syndrome Commodore Amiga Arcade Consoles
Dogs of War Commodore Amiga
Ghostbusters II Commodore 64 (C64)
Golden Axe Commodore Amiga Sega Megadrive / Genesis
Lazy Jones Commodore 64 (C64)
Lemmings 2: The Tribes Commodore Amiga
Shadow of the Beast Commodore Amiga
Speedball Commodore Amiga
Xenon 2: Megablast Commodore Amiga