Netherlands · Born 1972 · Composer & Sound Designer
A Dutch teenager who co-founded Maniacs of Noise in 1987 and became one of the defining Commodore 64 composers, with Cybernoid, Myth and the award-winning Turbo Outrun.
Jeroen Tel was born in Eindhoven on 19 May 1972, and he also works under the name WAVE. While still a teenager he met Charles Deenen at computer gatherings in Venlo, and together they founded Maniacs of Noise, a group devoted to composing music and designing sound effects for video games, which has worked in that field since 1987. Tel's reputation rests above all on the Commodore 64. Writing for its SID chip, he produced some of the most admired music of the machine's later years, including Cybernoid and Cybernoid II, Myth: History in the Making, Supremacy and RoboCop 3. His score for Turbo Outrun won a Best Music award at the ECTS trade show. Like other leading SID composers of the period, he wrote fast, dense pieces that made the three-voice chip sound much larger than it was. He continued working as consoles took over, composing for NES games and for Game Boy Color titles such as Warlocked (2000), and he spent several years at the Norwegian developer Funcom. In 2015 he ran a crowdfunding campaign for "Tel Me More", an album of remixes of his C64 music, which raised $27,420 from 699 backers.