| Jacob "Jake" Kaufman | |
|---|---|
Jake Kaufman in December 2009 |
|
| Background information | |
| Also known as | virt |
| Born | April 3, 1981 |
| Occupations | Composer, Remixer |
| Years active | 2000–present |
| Labels | Big Lion Music |
Jacob "Jake" Kaufman (also known as virt) (born April 3, 1981) is an American video game music composer. After starting out creating arrangements and remixes of video game soundtracks, he began his commercial composing career in 2000 with the score to a port of Q*Bert. He continued to compose music for games for the next couple of years, working primarily with handheld video games. In 2002, he set up the website VGMix, which hosts video game music remixes, and continues to administer it. His career began to take off over the next few years, resulting in him transitioning jobs into a full-time freelance composer by 2005. Since then he has worked on several big-name projects such as Contra 4 and Red Faction: Guerrilla.
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Jake Kaufman was born in America on April 3, 1981. Kaufman dropped out of high school, with what he describes as "a total lack of work ethic and no concept of timeliness or organization".[1] He spent the next few years composing arrangements and remixes of video game music under the alias "virt". In 2000, Kaufman broke into the video game industry as a composer; his first work was the Game Boy Color port of Q*Bert.[2] Over the next few years, he composed the music to several Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games. In 2002, Kaufman was one of the co-founders of the website VGMix, which hosts video game music remixes.[3] VGMix has been described as being just as influential as OverClocked ReMix, the other major video game music arrangement hosting site.[4]
During 2002-2005, his career as a video game music composer began to take off. By 2005, he was a full-time freelance video game composer.[5] He continues to compose music to increasingly big-name projects, such as Contra 4 and TMNT in 2007 and Red Faction: Guerrilla in 2009; he describes composing the soundtrack to a Contra game and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game as his "lifelong dream".[6] Kaufman contributed a track to the official arranged album of music from Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi.[7] He was a full-time employee of Volition, Inc. while working on Red Faction, but in January 2010 he left the company to become the "lead audio guy" for WayForward Technologies, for which he has already composed several soundtracks such as those of Shantae and Contra 4.[8] For WayForward he has composed the soundtrack to Shantae: Risky's Revenge, the sequel to the game he worked on ten years prior.[9] Kaufman is married to Kristi Kaufman, and lives with her and their puggle Nugget in northern Los Angeles where WayForward Technologies is located.[6][8]