My name is Brendan O'Callaghan Ratliff and I'm a composer, sound engineer and game developer.
I'm also Audio Director at Cardboard Sword
where we've just released
The Siege and The Sandfox and
are working on the forthcoming game
Transmission.
Born into a family of musicians and continuing a lineage of Irish traditional fiddle playing
from the age of 6, I also received classical violin and piano tuition and taught myself various
other instruments (guitar, bass, flute, etc) in my early teens. Since then I've been performing,
recording and composing professionally, as well as producing 8-bit/chiptune music in the demoscene
under the name Syphus since the early 1990s. When in the 2000s chipmusic finally became cool enough
to perform in public, I gigged around the world as Syphus with my Commodore Amiga and a keytar;
particular highlights included two Chiptune Alliance tours of Britain, and Blip Festival in
New York.
Back in the studio I've been commissioned to produce
original musical works for a wide range of clients including BBC Radio 3 Drama,
BBC Radio 4 Drama, Sunderland A.F.C., Newcastle United Foundation,
The Centre for Process Innovation, We Are Strongness and FME;
and for numerous games on PC/Mac, consoles and mobile.
Right now I'm lucky enough to be fulfilling a lifelong dream: making video games!
As Audio Director at
Cardboard Sword
I spend most of my time coding our in-house DAW and middleware, composing our music, and handling all
sound design production and implementation.
I also step in as a gameplay programmer and build engineer when required.
I also still have some availability for film and TV location sound recording work and can supply my own kit including:
My GitHub is where you can find my open-source software and hardware projects, such as:
To get in touch, please email me: brendan [ at ] echolevel [ dot ] co [ dot ] uk