Jon Miller, Creator Of The Sound Driver Used In Hundreds Of Mega Drive / Genesis Games, Passes Away

Another sad loss for the gaming industry, R.I.P.

When I read the headline I thought about how much the Ecco soundtrack reminds me of my young years. That sound really imprinted something in me, even though today that sound driver (and Ecco ST along with it) is commonly slagged off on the web. For me, I appreciate that bit of history.

Reminder: It's not so much the quality of GEMS as a system that was an issue, (although I gather it still required some effort) it was how it was used that was the problem.

FM in general is difficult to program and as a result that's why the 80s was full of commercial music that just used the default sounds on the DX-7 (the electric piano sound for example is everywhere), because they sounded good and people didn't know how to program new ones well.

So you had a generation of western game "composers" who couldn't work with FM directly but they also didn't really compose well for it. GEMS made it easy for them to get music into a game, but the skillset was the reason why it sounds bad in many games. Toejam and Earl is a GEMS game but it sounds amazing because it was written as an homage to funk music (the main theme is literally a lift from Chameleon by The Headhunters) rather than as a game soundtrack.

GEMS can sound really good in the right hands, the problem is that there weren't many good hands available. Or they were on PC games where they made more effort than the console guys.

Now compare to Japan, where they had earlier and wider access to FM in games and the composers frequently had backgrounds in programming and wrote their own low level sound drivers and that's why their stuff frequently sounds amazing. Yuzo Koshiro using his PC88 sound driver, which gave us parts of the glorious soundtracks for games like Ys 1 + 2 and such being used on the Mega Drive to give us Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage, and Hitoshi Sakimoto's driver for Midnight resistance making that port sound much better than even the arcade version being the two obvious examples.

Of course like anything else the internet has decided GEMS was the issue and not the poor work by the composers who often just made patterns of random bad sounding noises. it doesn't matter how good your tools are if you compose like that.

yeah, GEMS has a reputation for having Not Great presets, but you ever look at the program itself? at a time when your main options were MML, trying to port an Amiga sound driver over, or just writing music by hand in a hex editor, GEMS actually allowed you to use professional MIDI sequencers and controllers to essentially "record" game music. that's an impressive feat of engineering and Jon ought to be proud of making FM more accessible to westerners

The Spider Man game Jon worked on was why i got a Genesis. I was a comic fan back then and the game’s art style reminded me of Larsen’s run. I love that game still.
R.I.P. Jon Miller.

@Diogmites That Spider-Man game also was a big part of why I got the Genesis as well. I did have a friend who got the Genesis earlier in 1991 which allowed me to try Sonic, which I loved. Seeing those Spider-Man screen shots in magazines and catalogs removed any hesitation I had. I was recently thinking of playing it again soon. And I ended up really liking the game and played it quite a lot. They did a great job of making Spider-Man control and move well within the limits of 2D. I also happened to get into comic books that year, so I was very excited for the game, which I thought looked very impressive for the time. I last played it several years ago and still enjoyed it. I wasn't previously aware you can use web to slow Mary Jane's descent at the end and I finally figured out a reliable way to hit the Kingpin.

@sdelfin I saw the game in magazines too, and then was able to rent it along with the Genesis, and had already beaten the game when i received the system for xmas.
I still played through it repeatedly though, but before i had made my decision to get the Genesis, i told myself i had to find another game that i wanted to play as badly, and that was Climax’s Shining in the Darkness.
As you mention, Spidey felt great to control and i agree. In particular, i thought they nailed the web-slinging movement of his, and sticking to walls was simple and intuitive.
I think i figured out that it was possible to slow M.J.’s descent by accident, but it’s possible i had read it in a magazine.
I liked the photography aspect too, though it was essentially just taking screenshots of enemies for in-game cash.
It would be great if there was a way to get the game commercially, but i imagine the licensing is all jacked up.
Sonic i didn’t even try(even though it was bundled with the system) until i had gotten tired of going through Shining and Spider Man , but when i did, i fell in love with it too.

Glad to read about your experiences with it and good to know i’m not the only fan!