Lee Banyard

Lee Banyard is Audio Director at Cloud Imperium Games.

Works at CIG

He joined as audio director at Foundry 42 UK.

His role covers audio production as well as creative direction for the sound of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

Other Works

At 17, halfway through his A-level studies, he landed my first job in the games industry proper, at Graftgold. He had sent off some demo floppies some time prior and had practically forgotten he ’d done so, when they gave him a phone call. Graftgold had some huge hits in the 8-bit and 16 bit home computing eras; he’d personally played Uridium to death on the Spectrum. They wanted him to help out with what would be their last title for the Commodore Amiga, Virocop. He joined during the school holidays and somehow convinced them to take him on permanently.

He worked at Rocksteady Ltd on the sound design of Batman Arkham series of titles (including Asylum, City, and Knight as well as on Heavenly Sword. He worked as sound designer at Sony Computer Entertainment (now Guerrilla Cambridge).

Early Life

He has been composing and playing around with audio one way or another since he was 10 or 11, and I had always been fascinated with audio, as well as sound; some of his first memories are of witnessing vinyl records, and being amazed at this sound that came out.

He has always been into video games, his familly had one of those Grandstand consoles, with the Pong rip-off, which led to a having a succession of different home computers. Computers then got him into digital audio early, composing tracker modules and the like. Looking back he feels his music was always less about composition, and more about seeing just how high fidelity tracker modules could be, trying to get everything he could out of four channels of 8-bit sample playback.