Jamal Green

Jamal Green’s love for music stems right back to his childhood, where he would run around the school playground humming the soundtrack to whatever popular film was playing at the cinema at the time rather than acting out scenes like most kids. A further love for games led Jamal to start asking mobile games companies to feature his music, and over time his credit list has grown to include the likes of Equilinox (2018), Yuso (2018), Skelattack (2020), Sizeable (2021) and the film Aberdeen (2019). His most recent soundtrack was for TOEM (2021), which won a BAFTA for Debut Game in 2022.

In his own words:

“[Music] is really the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. I started at middle school, just writing tunes on Garage Band… My family is not very musical, just my older sister, who’s now the drummer for the Pet Shop Boys. When we were growing up, she was in the room next to me and I could hear her practicing through the walls. I could just hear the metronome ticking and her tapping away on a drum pad. I fell to sleep to that every night. Looking back, it just had to be music. I’ve never actually done any formal lessons… My mum was always supportive. She never questioned what I wanted to do – maybe my sister had made the headway before me…

“TOEM’s lead programmer sent me the [BAFTA Breakthrough] application and said I should go for it. Because we’d won a BAFTA, I felt lucky and a bit like I could do anything. I didn’t actually think I’d get it, so when the email came through I was very happy…

“I would just like to know more people. It’s one of the best avenues to do that, because it brings creative people together from different walks of life, different areas of the industry… I just want to be able to do this forever. But, if I’m honest, I do also want to reach the heights of my idols, too.”

Jamal’s Breakthrough credit is the game TOEM.