

In ‘94 my dad bought me a Master System, which was SEGA’s budget console by then, but it came with Sonic 8-Bit in the internal memory. Sonic’s attitude and speed were the coolest thing in the world to me! As a young kid, I loved the Saturday morning cartoons, the ads on TV, the merchandise… SEGA had a big cultural impact on Portuguese youth during the ‘90s. My fascination with Sonic began before I actually played the game. If I could dominate one instantly though, I’d probably pick the guitar - everything about guitars is incredibly badass.Ĭan you talk us through your personal history with the Sonic series, as a gamer? My process involves lots of editing and automatization, and it’s a zillion times less interesting than playing an instrument. I play the keyboard quite poorly at the moment - I’ve been training! Believe it or not, I sequence all of my music with a mouse and a QWERTY keyboard. What instruments do you play? Do you have a favourite? A lot of the stuff I find interesting nowadays probably would’ve sounded too odd to me some years ago. I can’t say my tastes have changed (and I’ve put that to the test), but they’ve certainly evolved and expanded. My list of influences is long, but I’ll mention a few names: Jun Senoue, Michiru Yamane, Nobuo Uematsu, Harumi Fujita, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, Yuzo Koshiro, Shusaku Uchiyama, and many others. Especially Japanese music, which I immediately identified with Video games were like a dimensional portal that allowed me to discover music I wouldn’t have heard anywhere else. Especially Japanese music, which I immediately identified with.

Because of this, video games were like a dimensional portal that allowed me to discover music I wouldn’t have heard anywhere else.
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We only had four TV channels and a local radio station, which mostly played whatever was popular at the time, and there wasn’t a music store for miles. I come from a small town in Portugal, and growing up, my access to music was very limited. What were your biggest musical influences when you were starting out? Have your tastes changed over the years? It’s curious that I started making game-inspired music using a game console, and now I compose for video games. I took lots of inspiration from the games I played during that experimentation period. I would then hook up the console to a boombox and record my songs onto cassette tapes that I’d give to my friends. I remember the song well - slow and corny, but catchy! In 1999, when I was 12, I came across a very unique title for the PlayStation called Music 2000, which allowed me to sequence my music using a PS1 controller, and then save the project files on my memory card. Tee Lopes: I composed my first original song when I was 8 using a small arranger keyboard I owned. Nintendo Life: How old were you when you began making music? Can you remember how you started experimenting?

We kick off the Nintendo Life Video Game Music Fest - a season of VGM-focused features and interviews - with an email chat with Tee where we asked him about how he started out, how he goes about crafting new music for retro-inspired titles, and his first experience with the Sonic series.
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If you've got a retro revival in the works and want to capture the spirit of a treasured series while also taking the audio to new and exciting places, it seems Tee Lopes is your go-to composer. X Nightmare DLC for Streets of Rage 4, and his work will also be heard in the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge and Metal Slug Tactics. His talent and passion garnered the attention of the right people over the last decade, and in recent years he's supplied the soundtrack for the brilliant Sonic Mania (a game that's now four-years-old!) as well as the Mr. Tee Lopes started out on the VGM scene releasing remixed and reimagined versions of some of gaming's most beloved music, with a special focus on one blue hedgehog in particular, and his compositions and arrangements now sit alongside those of series legends such as Masato Nakamura, Jun Senoue and Yuzo Koshiro in the Sonic canon. Fans of certain beloved Sega franchises should be very familiar with this composer's name by now.
