LOOK AT HEADSTONES[HOME]
[LOOK]
[WALK]
[MAP WEB]
LOOK AT HEADSTONES
[LOOK]
[WALK]
[MAP WEB]
A sad reality of running the Krondor Help Web for over 25 years is that some of the people associated with Betrayal at Krondor have passed away. This page is a memorial to those whom we have lost along the journey. They are posted in chronological order. If you know someone associated with the game, feel free to contact the site webmaster and he would be honoured to add it.
Hey folks, It is with a heavy heart that I announce the passing of a well-known Sierra/Dynamix composer, Jan Paul Moorhead (aka Jan Moorehead, and other variations). He passed in August 2020, survived by his wife, and this was discovered this week by a former Dynamix employee. He is probably best known for his amazing work on the Betrayal at Krondor score, and his part of the work on the Willy Beamish soundtrack, as well as some Incredible Machine music on various titles. I believe this is the first such passing we've experienced in the Sierra/Dynamix music community. Very sad news. My heart goes out to the Moorheads and the still quite tight-knit Dynamix ex-employee family. Vale, Jan Paul.
I'm extremely sorry to hear this. Jan was an affable and gregarious guy. A voracious reader, he also was a natural teacher, and he loved to share his knowledge with a willing ear. A bass player on the side, I met him on a blues gig probably around 1991, and found out he'd been hired as audio director for Dynamix. I was working on a master's degree, thinking I'd go into teaching, but really wanted to compose and arrange music professionally. Jan generously invited me to his house to talk about music production (something I knew nothing about), and check out his nice home studio he'd built. 3+ hours later I drove home with 2 boxes full of Electronic Musician and Keyboard magazines and some books on MIDI and studio production, which I voraciously read. Maybe 6-8 months later Jan called me to see if I wanted to interview for a paid internship gig doing speech file editing for the forthcoming Willy Beamish CD-ROM game. I jumped at it, quickly throwing together a music demo, teaching myself DOS and some other PC software for the interview with Bob Lindstrom so I didn't look like a complete idiot. I ended up getting the gig, and getting a full-time position at Dynamix. Very exciting times for me, and I have to thank Jan for putting me on this path. In recent years I really had wished I could reach out anf thank him - I tried tracking him down a few times over the years but he seemed to be off social media completely, and I had no idea where to look for him. Rest peacefully Jan! Here are a couple of anecdotes about Jan: he loved music technology, especially a little-known Atari-based MIDI sequencing program called C-Lab Notator. He was so enthused about this program that he convinced me to buy a used Atari ST computer and a copy of Notator. At work, (Dynamix), Jan was probably the only guy using an Atari, but he really loved Notator, and especially loved the "MIDI groove" quantization settings that were unique to Notator. We used to joke about his favorite groove - kind of a down-tempo, swung 16th LA funk groove that he would use A LOT. It became known among some of us as the "Jan groove" - he loved it and used it so much! You can hear the Jan groove in various Incredible Machine and 3D Ultra Mini-golf music tracks.
I'd forgotten about the Atari! Thank you for reminding me. That's how he and I first bonded because I had the same 520 ST rig at home. :)
I'm gutted. Jan was a wonderful guy and a key member of what I considered the best music/sound dept. in the business: Jan, Tim, and Chris. Now that Tim mentions it, I have a vague memory of signing off on the purchase of an Atari computer for Jan. I think I got a little pushback from management because "Atari," but when the quality of work is as superior as what came from that department, you just get the talent the tools they want. Sleep well, Jan, knowing and working with you made my life better.
I just wanted to thank you for keeping the BaK help web alive and you, vga256, for re-hosting the whole site! The original author was Eysteinn Björnsson, an old friend of mine who unfortunately passed away at the end of February this year, at the age of 67. The site went down when he stopped working for the University a few years ago and they purged his webspace. That also included an amazingly detailed analysis of old Norse poetry and manuscripts - which will soon be re-hosted by the Icelandic Ásatrú Fellowship (the Pagan/Old Norse society) on a new website they are working on. I hadn't realized the sites were down until after he passed away and desperately tried to get the BaK web back through the WayBack machine, hoping to revive it somehow or at least keep it archived - and I was incredibly relieved and happy to see that you here have already shared the .zip and put it back up! Way to go. Thank you so much. I know he would really appreciate it and that he was glad to see how long-lived the site turned out to be. Eysteinn was a friend of my parents who was completely immersed in fantasy and sci-fi and introduced me to so much material when I was growing up. He translated a large part of the Lord of the Rings into Icelandic and whenever he would discover some piece of art or fiction that intrigued him, he would immerse himself in that world and practically live there. He introduced me to Krondor when it was originally released (I was 11 at the time) and I vividly remember him working on that site throughout the 1990s - the amount of work and detail that went into making it was simply astounding. A one-man video game wiki! I'm glad that so many people have found the website valuable throughout the years and I hope that more players will keep coming back to it. Feel free to share that zip file as much as you want - it's part of his legacy, now. A nice way to keep his memory alive.
[TOP OF PAGE]
