The Fat Man

The Fat Man, George Alistair Sanger, has been creating music and other audio for games since Thin Ice for Intellivision in 1983, which means that, with only one known exception, he has been in that business longer than anyone else. He is internationally recognized for having contributed to the atmosphere of well over 250 games, including such sound-barrier-breaking greats as Loom, Wing Commander I and II, The 7th Guest I and II, NASCAR Racing, Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, and ATF. He was recording orchestral instruments for games as early as 1992, pressing to raise the quality of the gaming experience by using live instruments, lyrics, music videos, and digital recordings in games wherever where they had not been used before. For The 7th Guest, the first CD-ROM game to sell over 1.5 million copies, he created what is thought to be the first General MIDI (what computer users now generally refer to as "MIDI") soundtrack for a game, at the same time developing the FM tones that shipped with Microsoft Windows for years, allowing playback of GM files for users with low-level soundcards. He pioneered direct-to-MIDI live recording of musicians, and early on scored a soundtrack included with the game as a separate audio CD. His renditions of seven movements of Tsaikovski's Swan Lake contributed to that game's being considered a "work of art," and the score for Wing Commander was, if not the first, among the first soundtracks considered a selling point for the game. Most of this was done alongside his friends, the three other composers of Team Fat. For several years, Team Fat's music and sound effects dominated the American PC scene. Musicians were frequently directed by their employers to imitate Team Fat's work rather than that of artists in other media--a phenomenon that resurfaced recently with the sound design Sanger has done for slot machines. .

Sanger joined as the 21st member of the International Game Developers Association in 1994. In 1991, at the first Game Developers Conference awards show ever, the audio award went to Sanger's Wing Commander. Sanger helped pave the way for the first audio column in Game Developer magazine in 2001. In 2007 he was honored with the Developers' Choice award for Community Contribution.

Sanger has served on the board of advisors for Game Developer Magazine, and Full Sail's Game Development Degree program. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors for the Austin-based Game Audio Conference (now the audio track of the Austin GDC), has served on the Board of Directors of the BEAM Foundation, and has headed several peer committees to judge awards for game audio. In 1995, he was the first music producer to be accepted into the National Recording Academy based on his work in games rather than in CD's, film, or movies. He worked toward the goal of establishing a Grammy category for games, first independently with the Texas branch of NARAS, then years later in the group led by Chance Thomas that achieved this goal.

On the edge of the Canyon of the Eagles over the Colorado River, The Fat Man hosts the annual (since 1996) Texas Interactive Music Conference and BBQ (Project Bar-B-Q), the computer/music industry's most prestigious and influential conference. Based on the success of BBQ, in 2006 Sanger hosted the first Project Horseshoe, an intense think-tank aimed at solving game design's toughest problems.

Sanger was deeply inspirational in the founding of Game Audio's professional organization, the Interactive Audio Special Interest Group (IASIG). He worked for many years with the IASIG to establish a compatibility spec for General MIDI. He also established Fat Labs, which tested GM hardware and software in order to create the best possible experience for listeners. For a while, you couldn't sell a GM chip to a Taiwanese manufacturer without the "Fat Seal of Approval."

Sanger is mentioned in almost every book on the topic of Game Audio. His own book, The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness, published in 2003 by New Riders, is well-loved and much-quoted, and a very desireable collectors item. IMS ExpertServices, the premier subject matter search firm in the legal industry, rates Sanger as one of their small handful of EliteExperts.

At developer conferences, Sanger hosted "Demo Marathons" to allow game producers to be exposed to the music of many musicians from all over the world in a single sitting. His writings in his Music and Computers Magazine column, "Ride the Wired Surf," were meant to promote ideals and attitudes that would lead to better music on computers.

Sanger currently co-hosts the weekly webcast, Fatman and Circuit Girl, in which, through the process of inventing and prototyping, he and the well-known circuit design prodigy Jeri Ellsworth explore connections between art, science, fun, and creativity.

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