Stargate Worlds :: Bios and Pics :: Nick LaMartina, Sound Designer

Hi, I’m Nick LaMartina, and I’m the Sound Designer for Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

My love of games started at the early age of 2, when my dad took my brother and me into his work to play a game called “Lunar Lander”. It was my first exposure to gaming, and not long after, our dad gave us a Commodore 64 to share when we were 3. Our earliest experiences were filled with the likes of Ducks Ahoy, Congo Bongo, JumpMan, Pole Position, and Parallax. It was at that point that we both also found a love of video game music from the masters like Chris Huelsbeck, Martin Galway, and Rob Hubbard.

Over the years, my brother and I moved from one Nintendo system to the next, quickly becoming enamored with franchises like Mega Man and Mario Brothers. We’d write our own storylines, draw our own characters, and by the time the game Doom was released, we were creating our own levels, animations, and sounds. We loved gaming and the promise of true multiplayer experiences that were just around the corner (there was no such thing as “internet gaming” just yet). More than anything, we loved the experiences that games could create, and we constantly thirsted to find ways to make games better than they already were. For the moment, our dreams of what gaming could be remained only in our imaginations and on the stacks of papers that we furiously drew levels, characters, and stories on.

Once we were in high school, our interests began to diverge. He began to hone his artistic skills, and I began to study music more (previously, he played the cello and I played the piano). I became deeply involved in the choral program at my high school, and I kept studying voice at a tiny, 800+ student liberal arts school called Albertson College of Idaho, while my brother attended the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe. He studied multimedia arts, while I studied music. Four years later I graduated with a BA in Music with an emphasis on Vocal Performance and Composition/Theory.

Not long after graduation, my brother found work with EA Mythic in Virginia, and I began to deal with the realities of graduating with a music degree. My then-girlfriend (now wife) still had another year left at ACI, so I found a job selling video games at retail. Happy to have a job but miserable that I wasn’t able to do more with my education, I started thinking out loud to my girlfriend about opening a recording studio, something I had wanted to do for a very long time. Surprisingly, she told me, “Okay, let’s do it then.” We both cashed in on stocks that we had and used it to buy our first workstation and microphones. Later when we married, we used our gift money to buy more equipment and pay our monthly expenses so that we could quit our retail jobs.

I knew that running our own business would be hard, and it was (tremendously so), but it was also a liberating experience. My wife handled all the marketing and clients, and I handled the technical end of things. We worked mostly with high schools and bands recording their first CDs, but we eventually branched out into media conversion and ended up doing most any AV job. Happy and successful, but wishing I was writing more music, we decided to start sending out demos to video game companies in the hopes of getting some freelance gigs. During her research, my wife found a startup called Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, making an MMO based on Stargate. We sent a demo, they contacted me, and I found that they were hiring someone full-time for sound. Although my wife and I were sad to leave our hometown and the business that we had worked so hard for, we knew it was time to start a new phase of our adventure together, and I would be one step closer toward working with my brother professionally.

Chevron 2, engaged.

Nick LaMartina