Don Diekneite

to vgm
Hi all,

Some of you may have known Brad Fuller who was on this list. I am sad to say that he passed away yesterday morning after a year-long bout with cancer. He started out at Atari Games in the early 80s. He hired me in 1988 out of music school to move to California and we have been colleagues and close friends ever since. He was a pioneer in game audio, combining knowledge of tech with great sound design and music chops. Because of him, Atari acquired exclusive rights to the Yamaha 2151 FM chip for use on Arcade games, and for 2 years (I think) spearheaded the use of FM synthesis in game audio. It was an amazing leap from the simple 4-channel pokey chip (3 sine/square wave generators and a noise channel) that preceded game audio to that point.

Here's a nice summary (though a lot is left out):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1055868 … cation=ufi

And here's a nice podcast that was done last September.
http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-ep … r-composer

After Atari, he worked at several tech and tech-related companies including Phillips and OpenTV. Later, he and I founded Sonaural, an interactive audio provider for all manner of platforms. He continued maintaining Sonaural for the rest of his life.

He is survived by his wife and two sons.

RIP Brad.