Episode 96 - Pinball Composer w/ Chris Granner

Chris Granner discusses his legendary 40-machine pinball career composing for the YM2151 golden era.

Synopsis

Chris Granner, legendary pinball sound designer and composer for Williams, Stern, Capcom, and other manufacturers, discusses his 40-year career composing for ~40 pinball machines including iconic titles like The The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Indiana Jones, and Lord of the Rings. The episode covers his entry into the industry, his creative process, the technical constraints of the Yamaha YM2151 synthesizer chip that defined 1980s-90s pinball sound, and his collaborative relationships with legendary designers like Mark Ritchie, Pat Lawlor, and Steve Ritchie.

Highlights

• Chris Granner worked on approximately 40 different pinball machines during his career
• The Yamaha YM2151 synthesizer chip had 8 individual voices (monophonic notes) available for sound design, plus a separate drum track
• Chris Granner developed a novel rhythm guitar technique for Taxi using voice alternation and timing delays to create the illusion of a strummed chord from a two-voice synthesizer
• Mark Ritchie was Chris Granner favorite game designer to work with because of his collaborative and curious approach, in contrast to Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie who had more directorial control
• Craig Beierwaltes was the hiring manager at Williams who recruited Chris Granner, after being impressed by Granner's demo tape created on a Cyber 175 supercomputer using a Fortran program
• Brian Schmidt and Chris Granner worked closely together from early 1987 through 1990-91 to add capabilities to the pinball music programming language
• Chris Granner attended Eugene Jarvis 65th birthday party where he had dinner with Kendall Hale and their wives (who are both writers)
• Gottlieb games from the mid-1980s emphasized sound design, with Kendall Hale as a key composer during that era
• Mark Ritchie was the designer of Road Kings, which was the first game Chris Granner worked on at Williams
• Fish Tales joke about dynamite fishing ('you gonna talk or are you gonna fish?') originated from a real anecdote involving Mark Ritchie, Jack Skalon (mechanical engineer), and Chris Granner brainstorming the game's theme

Entities

• Capcom· company
• Gottlieb· company
• Mylstar· company
• Stern Pinball· company
• Williams· company
• Northwest Pinball Arcade Show· event
• University of Illinois Urbana· organization
• Wedgehead Pinball Podcast· organization
• Alan· person
• Alex· person
• Brian Schmidt· person
• Chris Granner· person
• Craig Beierwaltes· person
• Dave Zabriskie· person
• Eugene Jarvis· person
• Greg Dunlap· person
• Jack Skalon· person
• Kendall Hale· person
• Mark Ritchie· person
• Pat Lawlor· person
• Python· person
• Steve Ritchie· person
• Cyber 175· product
• Yamaha YM2151· product