Graeme Norgate worked at a bank. The hours were predictable. The salary was stable. The future was clear. He was twenty-three years old in early 1994, living in England, and by most standards he had made the responsible choice. But he had a friend at Rare — a small game developer in Twycross, Leicestershire — named Robin Beanland, who was already composing there. Beanland told him there was an opening. Norgate looked at the job he had and the job he did not yet have, and in April 1994, he left the bank and joined Rare.
His first assignment was immediate. Killer Instinct was in development — a fighting game headed for arcades and the Super Nintendo. Norgate and Beanland worked together on the score. The arcade version launched in North America on October 28, 1994. The SNES version followed in August 1995, and the first one hundred thousand copies in the United States came with a CD of arranged music from the game, titled Killer Cuts. The music was loud, synthetic, aggressive — the sound of a machine that wanted to fight. It was not subtle. It was not trying to be. Players remembered it.
The work continued. Norgate composed music for Donkey Kong Land on the Game Boy. He worked on Blast Corps. And then, in 1997, GoldenEye 007 — a first-person shooter based on the James Bond film, developed for the Nintendo 64. Norgate shared the composing duties with Grant Kirkhope and Robin Beanland. The game was released in Japan on August 23, 1997, in North America two days later, and in the United Kingdom in November. It sold over eight million copies. It became the third-best-selling game on the Nintendo 64. The music — tense, cinematic, restrained when it needed to be and loud when the action called for it — was part of what made the game feel like a film you were inside.
In the late 1990s, Rare began work on Perfect Dark, a spiritual successor to GoldenEye. Norgate started composing for it. He wrote the theme for the first level — 'dataDyne Central: Defection' — a piece that opened with tension and anticipation, the sound of someone stepping into a building they were not supposed to enter. But in February 1999, Norgate left Rare. He had been there for nearly five years. His reasons were his own. What is known is that Grant Kirkhope took over as the primary composer for Perfect Dark, with contributions from David Clynick. Some of Norgate's early work remained in the final game, which was released on May 22, 2000. The game sold well. Norgate did not see it finished.
What he did instead was co-found a company. In April 1999, one month after leaving Rare, Norgate and three other former Rare developers — David Doak, Steve Ellis, and Karl Hilton — established Free Radical Design in Stoke-on-Trent. The four of them had worked together at Rare. They knew what they could do. They wanted to do it on their own terms. The company was small. The risk was large. They had no publisher, no guaranteed income, no safety net. What they had was skill and the belief that it would be enough.
Free Radical Design's first game was TimeSplitters, a first-person shooter built for the PlayStation 2. The team at the end of development numbered sixteen people. Norgate composed the music. The game was delivered to publisher Eidos Interactive in time for the PlayStation 2's launch in October 2000. TimeSplitters was well-received. It led to two sequels — TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect — both of which Norgate also scored. The series became known for its variety, its humor, and its music, which moved fluidly between moods and decades, from orchestral grandeur to synthetic pulses to quiet dread.
Free Radical Design continued for nearly a decade. Norgate remained as the company's audio director. The company was eventually acquired by Crytek and renamed Crytek UK. Norgate stayed on. When Crytek UK closed, he moved to Dambuster Studios. Through all of it, he kept composing — for the TimeSplitters series, for Crysis, for other projects that came and went. The work he had begun at a bank he no longer worked at had become a career that spanned console generations.
Graeme Norgate was born on March 20, 1971, in England. In 1994, he left a stable job to write music for games. The music he wrote — for Killer Instinct, for GoldenEye 007, for Perfect Dark, for TimeSplitters — became part of the memory of millions of people who played those games and heard those sounds and felt something. The decision to leave the bank was not a grand gesture. It was a choice, made quietly, in early 1994, with no guarantee of what would follow. What followed was a body of work that outlasted the job he left behind. The thing you are holding onto because it is safe — is it safer than the thing you have not yet tried?