What inspiration do you have that might surprise people? Obviously, we're a space game, so people think Star Wars, Star Trek, The Last Starfighter, but what influences do you have that people might not expect or assume?

I don't know if any of you ever played games on the Amiga, but that was a very fond memory I had with my father. He was a music fan, he was a game fan, he was a sci-fi fan, like a nerd, but he never composed or played anything. But his passion passed on through me. I studied and I was able to execute what he loved. And he loved the Amiga. We played together so many hours of Amiga games, Commodore Amiga. There's some great stuff from that time. For example, Shadow of the Beast, that's something that comes to my mind right now. It was an amazing soundtrack at the time. You can see there were limitations on the Commodore Amiga, but it was quite astounding for the time that we were living in. Actually, it was on the Amiga that I started writing music. My first track was written on the Amiga, and my father was able to hear only the first track in his life.

And I remember a reference that I actually used in Star Citizen, which I really loved, was a game called The Chaos Engine. It was a beautiful shoot-'em-up game with two characters at the same time. We could play with two players. I used to play that with my father and with friends. And there was something there that when you fired up a node, it would say, node activated, node activated, with a very particular tone and character in the voice. So when I did the music for the first racing module in Star Citizen, I called it Speed Activated. That was the name of the track. And in the music, when you get to the climactic part before the music starts with the kick, I pronounced that sequence, but said 'speed activated'. And you can hear me saying that, but I EQ'd it a lot so it would sound like it's from the game, from The Chaos Engine. I always like to bring into every piece that I do a little something that is kind of a small secret for me. So that's why it's called Speed Activated. Also in that particular track, I wanted to bring in the composer from The Chaos Engine. I wanted to use the kind of bass he had in his original soundtrack, but sadly he passed away quite many years before, so I actually spoke with his brother. But since he passed away, I couldn't use anything, so I had to do it. But at least I said 'speed activated'. So that was a reference or a homage to a great Amiga game. Another great Amiga game that I love, but which I still haven't used as a direct reference, and I will once we get a game inside Star Citizen that looks like it, maybe it will never happen, was Speedball 2. That was from The Bitmap Brothers as well. It was a fantastic game.

Other good references that are very strange to realize: I like math a lot. I always loved math at school. So in the music I do, not always, but many times, I try to create some patterns in melodies or rhythms that have a meaning in math as well. I can remember the ArcCorp theme that I wrote. I noted down the upward intervals, and the sum of the first two, which are prime numbers, gives a second number, which is also a prime number. Since ArcCorp is such a perfect city, a mathematically perfect city that fills the globe with construction, and it requires a lot of engineering to merge all this stuff together, I thought it was a cool way in the melody to also reflect that mathematical perfection, if you will, in the music. You don't have to think about it. I like the melody by itself without the math, but it also has math. I wrote that in the description of some YouTube video. No one would ever get that one if I didn't explain it, because I think it was too nerdy. But I enjoyed doing that. So it has some strange references, perhaps.