Game of tones

Richard Jacques was 11 years old when his parents gave him a ZX Spectrum for his birthday. As well as using it to play games, he would get up at 5am to get in an hour of music programming before school. In his teens he upgraded to an Atari, and set up a studio with synthesizers in his bedroom. He was awarded a scholarship to study trombone and piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London; within a week of starting there, he had bought himself a Sega Mega Drive console.

Fast forward three decades and Jacques is now known for the many orchestral scores he has written for blockbuster game franchises such as James Bond 007, Mass Effect and Headhunter.

It seems almost inevitable that his first job after completing his music studies would be as an in-house composer for Sega Europe and that his score for 2001’s – a role-playing game featuring motorbiking hero Jack