New Video Examines The Many Lofty Claims Of Tommy Tallarico

The YouTuber hbomberguy has published a new video exploring the origins of the infamous "Oof" sound from Roblox and the many claims that former Intellivision boss and Video Game Live co-founder Tommy Tallarico has made over the years.

The video, which is roughly two hours in length, first scrutinizes a bunch of tweets from Tallarico, which appear to show the composer changing his story over who was responsible for the famous Roblox sound effect.

In 2019, for instance, he attributes it in a deleted tweet to his "lead sound designer" at Tommy Tallarico Studios Joey Kuras, before tweeting his surprise at how popular it was on YouTube, and claiming that "we created" it and that he himself had "recorded" it.

hbomberguy's video then goes on to investigate a bunch of other claims Tallarico has made over the years, including that he was the first American to work on the Sonic the Hedgehog series, that he has worked on over 300 games (for which he previously received recognition from the reference book Guinness), that he worked with Miyamoto for 5 years on Metroid Prime, and that he appeared on MTV Cribs.

As hbomberguy points out in his video, Tallarico worked on Sonic and the Black Knight in 2009. This was decades after other Americans like Michael Jackson and Mark Cerny had already contributed to the series.

As for the 300 games claim, hbomberguy was unable to find a record of all of these titles, even after contacting Guinness. In fact, Guinness responded to hbomberguy's producer Kat Lo via email that "These titles are research based rather than evidence based" and subsequently removed this record from its search engine for unknown reasons following a request for further information.

Tallarico, meanwhile, worked on Metroid Prime early in its development before his role as an external contractor came to an end, but in several interviews included as clips in hbomberguy's video, he references working closely with Miyamoto for around five years and claims that he was personally hand-selected for the project.

The most bizarre out of all these claims, however, is that he supposedly appeared on MTV Cribs. On his YouTube channel, Tallarico uploaded a video called 'MTV Cribs - Tommy Tallarico' in 2018, but as hbomberguy was able to uncover through some Internet Archive sleuthing this was actually filmed for a UK TV show called Gamer.TV instead.

We've reached out to Tommy Tallarico for a comment and will update the article as soon as we hear back.