United Kingdom · Born 1967 · Composer
Working under the name CoLD SToRAGE, Welsh composer Tim Wright scored Psygnosis' Amiga hits and then WipEout — whose big-beat electronic soundtrack helped bring 1990s club music into the mainstream of video games.
Tim Wright, born in Cymau, Flintshire, Wales in 1967, is better known by his professional alias CoLD SToRAGE — a name taken from the poorly-insulated, tin-sheeted little studio room he worked in at Psygnosis' Wavertree Technology Park in Liverpool. His early commercial music was made on the Commodore Amiga, and a demo piece called "Puggs in Space" brought him to the attention of Psygnosis managing director Ian Hetherington, who hired him to score the company's Amiga and Atari ST catalogue. His first decade of work is a tour through the Amiga's most celebrated games. He contributed to Shadow of the Beast II and Agony — showcases for the machine's audio — and to Lemmings (1991), where his involvement began as a rescue job: when a work-in-progress version of the game arrived using tunes that turned out to be copyrighted, Hetherington asked Wright to quickly compose replacement music, and he did. Working within the Amiga's four-channel sample playback, he developed a strong command of getting rich, melodic music out of limited hardware. His defining work came with the transition to the PlayStation. As senior sound artist at Psygnosis, Wright scored WipEout (1995) and especially WipEout 2097 (1996), the futuristic anti-gravity racers whose soundtracks drew directly on the mid-1990s UK electronic scene — big beat and techno in the vein of The Chemical Brothers. The games paired his original tracks (and, in 2097, licensed dance acts) with a sleek Designers Republic visual identity, and the result did as much as any single game to establish electronic club music as a natural fit for the medium. WipEout was marketed almost as a piece of rave culture, and Wright's music was central to that positioning. Wright left Psygnosis and in 2003 formed his own multimedia company, Tantrumedia. As CoLD SToRAGE he retained a devoted following, particularly among fans of the WipEout series and the Amiga demo-adjacent music scene, and his work is regularly cited as a bridge between the tracker-music culture of the 16-bit home computers and the dance-music sensibility that defined a certain strand of 1990s console gaming. He remains one of the most recognisable names in British game music.