In the late 1980s and early 1990s, an Ocean Software game often announced itself before the player had reached the first level. Music spilled from the Commodore 64 while a cassette or disk loaded, title screens turned limited sound hardware into miniature electronic performances, and licensed games based on some of the biggest films of the period arrived with soundtracks that were often entirely different from what audiences had heard in theaters.
Behind a remarkable amount of that sound was Jonathan Dunn.
Known as “Choroid” during his Commodore 64 scene days, Dunn became one of Ocean Software’s most important musicians and sound programmers during the company’s rise as a major British game publisher. His credits eventually stretched across computers and consoles including the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST, Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Super Nintendo. Yet describing him simply as a video game composer leaves out much of what made his career unusual. Dunn wrote music, created sound effects, adapted arcade scores, programmed audio drivers, and built tools that helped Ocean make sound work on machines whose limitations were radically different from one another.
His career also produced one of the strangest afterlives in video game music. A quiet piece written for the Game Boy version of RoboCop escaped the game, appeared in British advertising, resurfaced through internet culture and sampling, and decades later was still being discussed as one of the memorable melodies of the 8-bit era.
From Preston to the Commodore 64
Dunn grew up in Preston, Lancashire, in an era when affordable home computers were beginning to change what it meant to make games and electronic music. His first computer was a Dragon 32, but he later recalled that he became jealous of the larger selection of games appearing on competing machines and replaced it with a Commodore 64. That decision would shape much of his early career.
He did not begin with the intention of becoming a professional game composer. Dunn was interested in computers and music at the same time. He had taken music lessons, owned a synthesizer, and understood basic music theory, while on the computer side he taught himself BASIC and later assembly language. He was studying performance music and technology at college, a relatively new course at the time, with thoughts of becoming a recording engineer or music producer. The C64 offered a way to bring those interests together.
One of his early tools was Electrosound, a Commodore 64 music package that allowed him to experiment with computer composition. Dunn later remembered the step-based editor as comparatively straightforward. Professional work at Ocean would eventually become far more technical, with music entered as data and assembled through the company’s development system.
Before Ocean, however, there was the emerging computer scene.
Choroid, Compunet, and the C64 Scene
Dunn began circulating music under the name “Choroid,” a handle that sounded mysterious enough to invite an elaborate origin story. Years later he admitted there was nothing particularly complicated behind it. He simply liked the word.
The name became associated with his work on Compunet, an early online service used by Commodore owners in Britain. Long before ordinary households had internet access, Compunet gave enthusiasts a place to exchange programs, demos, graphics, and music. Dunn remembered the excitement of downloading material created by other people and also remembered the telephone bills that came with that enthusiasm. Preserved Commodore scene databases still identify Jonathan Dunn with the Choroid handle and retain records of music connected to his preprofessional and professional years.
An important break came through ZZAP!64. While studying at college, Dunn entered one of the magazine’s music competitions and finished as a runner-up, which brought wider attention to his work. He began receiving calls from people in the European computer scene and continued distributing his music under the Choroid identity.
Compunet also connected him with Hugh Binns. Their collaboration led to Dunn’s first paid commercial game music, for Subterranea, released through Hewson’s Rack-It label. Dunn later described the project as the moment when he realized it might actually be possible to earn money doing something he already loved.
College was ending, however, and a permanent career in game music was far from guaranteed.
A Demo Arrives at Ocean at Exactly the Right Time
After finishing his course, Dunn took a summer job at Argos while considering what to do next. A friend encouraged him to send music demos to game companies in hopes of picking up freelance work. Dunn remembered sending material to only a handful of publishers.
One of them was Ocean Software.
The timing could hardly have been better. Martin Galway, Ocean’s celebrated in-house musician and one of the major figures in Commodore 64 audio, was preparing to leave. Dunn arrived at Ocean’s Central Street offices in Manchester apparently expecting the possibility of freelance work. Instead, the company offered him an in-house position. He accepted and left his warehouse job. Retrospective research based on Dunn’s interviews places his arrival at Ocean in October 1987.
The opportunity came with pressure. Galway had already established a recognizable sound through games and Ocean’s famous loading music, and Dunn was young, entering his first full-time industry job, and replacing a musician admired throughout the C64 community.
When Dunn was later asked which projects had been the highlights of his career, he named Platoon as one of them specifically because so much was expected of him after Galway’s departure.
Platoon and the Making of an Ocean Musician
Platoon became one of Dunn’s important early Ocean projects. The game was based on Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film, but obtaining a movie license did not necessarily mean Ocean had also acquired the rights to the movie’s music. Dunn later explained that, on many licensed games, the expectation was simply that new music would have to be written. Sometimes arcade conversions involved transcribing existing pieces, occasionally with sheet music, but original composition remained a major part of the work.
That distinction helps explain why licensed Ocean games developed musical identities that could be quite separate from the films, television programs, or arcade machines on which they were based.
Dunn was also learning the technology beneath those compositions. He recalled beginning at Ocean with one of Martin Galway’s music players, moving later to a driver created by programmer Paul Hughes, and eventually developing his own. By the time of Total Recall, Dunn said he was using the last iteration of his own C64 driver.
His progression from using another developer’s audio system to programming his own is essential to understanding the rest of his career.
Ocean Loader 4 and the Music Before the Game
For Commodore 64 players, Ocean’s loading music became almost as recognizable as the games themselves. Cassette loading could take several minutes, so Ocean turned waiting time into part of the presentation.
Martin Galway and Peter Clarke had supplied earlier Ocean loader pieces. Dunn continued the tradition. Preservation research identifies Dunn as the composer of Ocean Loader 4, first associated with Target Renegade in 1988, and of Ocean Loader 5, which reworked the earlier piece and appeared with later Ocean releases.
These tunes mattered because they existed at the boundary between functional software and company identity. A player might encounter the loader before seeing much of the actual game, which meant the music became part of what Ocean itself sounded like.
The survival of those tracks through modern SID archives, remixes, and retro releases has also given Dunn’s work a second life far beyond the original games. Decades later, Ocean Loader 4 continued appearing in remix culture and even in the credits of later software.
RoboCop, Operation Wolf, and Ocean’s Blockbuster Years
By 1988 and 1989, Dunn’s name was appearing on some of Ocean’s largest releases.
The original Ocean RoboCop documentation for the Spectrum and Amstrad versions directly credits Jonathan Dunn with the music. The surviving manual is particularly valuable because it provides contemporary evidence from Ocean itself rather than relying on later credit databases.
Operation Wolf, another major arcade license, likewise credited Dunn with music and sound effects on versions of the game, showing how his job extended beyond melodies alone.
The Chase H.Q. instructions from 1989 credit Jon O’Brien with programming, William Harbison with graphics, and Jonathan Dunn with music for the Spectrum and Amstrad editions. The surviving credits are a useful reminder that these conversions were often the work of very small groups of specialists who had to rebuild an arcade experience for hardware far removed from the original machine.
Dunn was becoming one of the people responsible for giving those conversions their identity.
When Writing Music Also Meant Writing Code
Modern game composition can involve vast libraries of sampled instruments and specialized middleware. Dunn’s work was born in a different environment. The composer often needed to understand the machine almost as intimately as the programmer.
At Ocean, Dunn described entering music into data statements that were then assembled through the company’s development system. His work could not be separated cleanly into composition on one side and programming on the other because the limitations of the hardware determined what sounds could exist in the first place.
This became particularly clear on Nintendo hardware.
For the NES, Dunn wrote what preservation researchers identify as Music Driver V1.0, a 6502 assembly sound system used across Ocean projects. Surviving ROM data contains the identification “MUSIC DRIVER V1.0 (C)JONATHAN DUNN & OCEAN SOFTWARE.” Other Ocean musicians, including Matthew Cannon, Keith Tinman, and Barry Leitch, also used the system, which means the presence of Dunn’s driver inside a game does not automatically prove that he composed that game’s score. It does, however, demonstrate that his programming work formed part of Ocean’s underlying audio infrastructure.
Dunn later explained that when he created his NES driver, he tried to carry forward techniques developed while working with the Commodore 64. Instead of viewing each new machine as an entirely separate problem, he brought lessons from one generation of sound hardware into the next.
A Typical Day Meant Making the Same Music Work Again
Dunn’s description of everyday life at Ocean captures how broad the job became. He would make music, then work on making that music function on the Spectrum, Amstrad, Game Boy, and PC. Later, the NES and SNES joined the list.
That workflow was not simply a matter of copying a file from one computer to another. Each platform had different sound capabilities, memory restrictions, processors, and development tools. A composition that worked effectively on one machine might need to be rewritten or rearranged before it could survive on another.
This is one reason credits from the period can become complicated. Dunn might be the original composer on one version, the arranger or converter on another, and the programmer of the sound driver on still another. Surviving manuals and preservation databases therefore have to be read carefully rather than treating every appearance of his name as the same kind of credit.
Total Recall and Dunn’s Favorite C64 Work
Ocean’s Total Recall is another useful example of the collaborative structure of the company. Preserved Spectrum records associate the game with a team that included James Higgins, Andrew Deakin, Ivan Horn, Warren Lancashire, Jonathan Dunn, Mark R. Jones, and Simon Butler.
For Dunn, however, the Commodore 64 version held particular significance. In later interviews he identified his Total Recall work as a personal favorite among his C64 compositions, while separately explaining that the game used the last version of the C64 music driver he had developed.
By that stage he was no longer merely the young musician who had arrived to fill Martin Galway’s position. His own tools and methods had become part of Ocean’s production process.
The Unexpected Life of the RoboCop Theme
Of all Dunn’s compositions, one of the most enduring came from a machine with extremely limited audio hardware.
Ocean released RoboCop for the Game Boy in 1990. Dunn approached the handheld with the same mentality that had guided his earlier C64 work. Rather than seeing hardware limitations only as obstacles, he enjoyed trying to make the machine sound larger and more expressive than its specifications suggested.
The title music became the game’s great surprise.
Instead of opening with an aggressively mechanical piece that seemed naturally suited to RoboCop, Dunn created something restrained, melancholy, and unusually reflective. He later explained that the central idea had originated not at Ocean but at the piano in his mother’s restaurant in Preston. She hosted live jazz nights, and after the restaurant closed Dunn sometimes sat at the piano experimenting with ideas. The chord progression that became associated with RoboCop emerged from one of those sessions.
The tune then escaped the game.
According to Dunn, an advertising executive heard it while his son was playing RoboCop on a Game Boy. The agency contacted Ocean, and the music was subsequently used in British advertising for Ariston appliances. Years later the tune moved through internet videos and sampling culture, while Dunn’s other work, including music from Platoon, was also sampled by later artists.
The strangest recognition arrived decades after the Game Boy cartridge. Charlie Brooker selected the RoboCop music for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Dunn described the appearance as a major honor and noted its significance for video game music reaching a cultural institution far removed from the world of home computers.
A melody created under severe technical restrictions had lasted far longer than anyone involved in the original project expected.
The Addams Family and a New Generation of Hardware
The move to 16-bit consoles gave Dunn another opportunity to expand his methods.
Ocean’s The Addams Family appeared across several platforms in the early 1990s. The surviving 1992 manual for the Amiga and Atari ST versions directly credits James Higgins with programming, Warren Lancashire with graphics and design, Simon Butler with additional graphics, and Jonathan Dunn with music and sound effects.
The Super Nintendo version was particularly important to Dunn personally. In his Recollection interview, he named The Addams Family on SNES alongside Platoon as one of his career highlights. By then he had written his own music driver for the new platform and also created a converter that allowed him to do much of the composition through MIDI before converting the work into data statements that could be adjusted for the game.
That process shows how Dunn’s career evolved alongside the hardware. The tools became more sophisticated, but his instinct remained the same: understand the machine, create the technology needed to communicate with it, and then use those technical boundaries as part of the composition process.
Jurassic Park and Pushing the SNES
Dunn’s work on Jurassic Park became another major example of that philosophy. The 1993 Super Nintendo credits identify him with both music and sound effects, while soundtrack preservation projects attribute the SNES score to him.
Years later Dunn described The Addams Family and Jurassic Park as some of his best SNES work. The technical solution used for Jurassic Park was especially clever because the game could not simply keep a large collection of high-quality audio samples permanently available in sound memory.
Instead, Dunn said the game streamed new banks of audio samples as the player moved around the park. The approach required more cartridge space, but it allowed the soundtrack to make use of better samples while working within the SNES audio memory available to the game.
The result illustrates why reducing Dunn to the word “composer” misses so much. The musical experience depended directly on an engineering decision about how and when sound data moved through the hardware.
Twelve Years with Ocean and a Move Toward Production
Dunn later remembered spending roughly twelve years with Ocean, including a period working from the company’s American operation in San Jose. By the later 1990s his credits increasingly moved beyond day-to-day composition and sound programming into production. His career was changing at roughly the same time that the technical nature of game audio itself was changing.
The 1998 Nintendo 64 game Wetrix, developed by Zed Two, credits Jonathan Dunn as producer for the Infogrames production team.
By 2000 he was also credited as producer on Taz Express, while Aqua Aqua credited his music through Semi-Precious Studios. Preservation research identifies Dunn as the founder of Semi-Precious Studios, which brought together audio personnel including Dunn, Dean Evans, Dave Boardman, and Doug Boyes.
His game credits continued into the early 2000s on handheld and console projects, but the industry was moving away from the kind of work that had originally attracted him.
Why Dunn Moved Away from Game Music
Dunn has been unusually clear about why his composing career changed.
He loved working within strict hardware limits. Writing drivers, finding unexpected sounds, squeezing music through tiny amounts of memory, and discovering tricks that made a simple sound chip appear more capable than it really was were not inconveniences surrounding the creative work. For Dunn, they were part of the creative work.
As games entered an era in which recorded audio could increasingly be played back without a composer building a custom sound system for every machine, some of that challenge disappeared. Dunn later said that he did not receive the same enjoyment from the CD audio era and eventually moved toward other work.
He remained in games for years in managerial positions and later worked in casino gaming. He also continued making music outside traditional game soundtracks, releasing house music under the name Soularis and working with Chicago label Guidance Recordings.
His story eventually circled back toward mainstream game development. In 2023 Dunn was publicly identified as development director at Triternion, the studio behind Mordhau, and discussed the work involved in bringing its melee combat to consoles.
More Than the Man Who Wrote the RoboCop Theme
Jonathan Dunn occupies an interesting place in game history because his career connects several different eras.
He emerged from the bedroom-computer and demo culture surrounding the Commodore 64. He entered professional development when an individual musician might be responsible not only for composing a tune but also for figuring out how the machine could reproduce it. He became part of Ocean during the company’s great period of arcade conversions and film licenses, contributed to the sound of some of its most recognizable releases, and then carried those methods into Nintendo hardware as the industry shifted from European home computers toward consoles.
His surviving credits tell only part of that story. The deeper evidence is found in his drivers, conversion tools, interviews, and the testimony of other Ocean developers. The music was inseparable from programming.
That is why his career stretches naturally from Platoon and the Ocean loaders to RoboCop, Total Recall, The Addams Family, and Jurassic Park. Different machines required different solutions, but Dunn repeatedly approached them from the same direction. Learn what the hardware could do, learn what it supposedly could not do, and then find a way to make music somewhere in between.
Looking back on the Commodore 64 years, Dunn once described the machine as a vehicle for creativity. The remark fits more than the C64. The technology changed constantly around him, but his most memorable work came from treating limitations not as reasons to simplify an idea, but as reasons to invent another way of making it work.
Sources & Further Reading
ST/Amiga Format. “Jonathan Dunn Interview.” No. 10 (April 1989). Future Publishing. https://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/st-amiga-format-issue-10.pdf
The Games Machine. “Heard It All, Dunn It All.” No. 27 (February 1990): 92–93. https://archive.org/details/the-games-machine-27/page/n91
Retro Gamer. “Jonathan Dunn Interview.” No. 9 (2004). Live Publishing. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/R/Retro%20Gamer%20UK/09.pdf
SIDwave. “Interview with Jonathan Dunn.” Recollection, no. 3. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.atlantis-prophecy.org/recollection/?id_interview=92&load=interviews
McFerran, Damien. “How RoboCop’s Epic Game Boy Theme Lives On More Than 30 Years Later.” Time Extension, October 18, 2022. https://www.timeextension.com/features/flashback-how-robocops-epic-game-boy-theme-lives-on-more-than-30-years-later
Ocean Software. RoboCop. ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC instruction manual. Manchester: Ocean Software, 1988. https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Sinclair_ZX_Spectrum/manual/Formated/RoboCop_-_1988_-_Ocean_Software_Ltd..pdf
Ocean Software. Operation Wolf. Instruction manual and development credits. Manchester: Ocean Software, 1988. https://uta.pokefinder.org/Ultimate_Tape_Archive/Biz%2C_The_%281988_Ocean_Software_Ltd%29_%5B11664%5D/Extras/Instructions.pdf
Ocean Software. Chase H.Q. Instruction manual. Manchester: Ocean Software, 1989. https://www.atarimania.com/st/files/power_up_ocean_software_manual.pdf
Ocean Software. The New Zealand Story. Amstrad CPC instruction manual. Manchester: Ocean Software, 1989. https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Amstrad_CPC/manual/Formated/New_Zealand_Story_-_1989_-_Ocean_Software_Ltd..pdf
Ocean Software. The Addams Family. Amiga and Atari ST instruction manual. Manchester: Ocean Software, 1992. https://generationgamerz.be/emulation/Atari_ST/pdf/manuals/Addams_Family_%28The%29/Addams_Family_%28The%29.pdf
Tangent. The Airwolf Demo. Commodore 64 demo. December 1986. Commodore 64 Scene Database. https://csdb.dk/release/?id=41798
Video Game Music Preservation Foundation. “Ocean Loaders (C64).” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Ocean_Loaders_%28C64%29
Video Game Music Preservation Foundation. “Music Driver V1.0.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Music_Driver_V1.0
Retro Gamer. “The Making of the Daley Thompson Series.” No. 105 (August 2012). Imagine Publishing. https://archive.org/details/retro_gamer/RetroGamer_105
ACE. Jonathan Dunn interview and profile material. No. 45 (June 1991). Future Publishing. https://archive.org/details/ACE_Issue_45_1991-06_Future_Publishing_GB/page/n61
CRASH. Review of Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge. No. 58 (November 1988). https://archive.org/details/crash-magazine-58
CRASH. Reviews of Operation Wolf and RoboCop. No. 59 (December 1988). https://archive.org/details/crash-magazine-59
CRASH. Readers’ Top 10 Music chart. No. 61 (February 1989). https://archive.org/details/crash-magazine-61
ZZAP!64. Readers’ music charts. No. 64 (August 1990). https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine-064
ZZAP!64. “The Jolly Jon Dunn Music Player.” No. 78 (October 1991). https://archive.org/details/zzap64-magazine-078
The One. “The Addams Family.” No. 42 (March 1992). https://archive.org/details/theone-magazine-42
Centre for Computing History. “RoboCop.” Museum collection record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/18549/Robocop/
Centre for Computing History. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Museum collection record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/64422/Terminator-2-Judgment-Day-%28Hit-Squad%29/
Centre for Computing History. “Darkman.” Museum collection record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/43342/Darkman/
Centre for Computing History. “Ocean Software.” Collection database. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/cgi/archive.pl?platform=&publisher=Ocean&type=Games
World of Spectrum. “RoboCop.” Software archive and preservation record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://worldofspectrum.net/item/0004179/
MobyGames. “Jonathan Dunn: Video Game Credits.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/person/31702/jonathan-dunn/credits/
MobyGames. “Wetrix Credits, Nintendo 64.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/3164/wetrix/credits/n64/
MobyGames. “Taz Express Credits, Nintendo 64.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/14988/taz-express/credits/n64/
MobyGames. “Aqua Aqua Credits, PlayStation 2.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/3544/aqua-aqua/credits/ps2/
MobyGames. “Loons: The Fight for Fame Credits, Xbox.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.mobygames.com/game/16581/loons-the-fight-for-fame/credits/xbox/
Video Game Music Preservation Foundation. “Jonathan Dunn.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Jonathan_Dunn
Video Game Music Preservation Foundation. “Ocean Software.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Ocean_Software
Code Like It’s 198x. “Jonathan Dunn.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://code198x.com/vault/people/jonathan-dunn/
Wilkins, Chris, and Roger M. Kean. Ocean: The History. Kenilworth, UK: Revival Retro Events, 2013. https://www.scribd.com/document/653712572/Ocean-History
Yarwood, Jack. “Ocean Software’s Central Street HQ: Manchester, England.” Time Extension. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.timeextension.com/features/sacred-spaces-ocean-softwares-central-street-hq-manchester-england
McAlpine, Kenny. “The Development of Early Video Game Audio.” In Innovation in Music: Performance, Production, Technology and Business. Edited by Russ Hepworth-Sawyer, Jay Hodgson, Justin Paterson, and Rob Toulson. New York: Routledge, 2021. https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781351016704_A37408540/preview-9781351016704_A37408540.pdf
SNESmusic.org. “Jurassic Park.” Super Nintendo soundtrack preservation record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://snesmusic.org/v2/profile.php?profile=set&selected=1334
NESdev. “NES Music Authors List.” Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.nesdev.org/authors.htm
Commodore 64 Scene Database. “Jonathan Dunn / Choroid.” Scener database record. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://csdb.dk/scener/?id=639
Lemon64. “Total Recall.” Commodore 64 game database. Accessed October 25, 2026. https://www.lemon64.com/game/total-recall