Pierrot (Tamás Z. Marosi)
Encyclopedia
Pierrot, born Tamás Zoltán Marosi (3 September, 1969 in Budapest
, Hungary
) is a Hungarian game designer, musician and producer, best known internationally for his video game series AGON
(Ancient Games Of Nations) and Yoomurjak's Ring
. He is also well known in Hungary as a musician, singer-songwriter and producer of several music albums. His own music style is primarily acoustic “adult pop”, while as a producer, he has a colorful portfolio of various styles ranging from world music
to alternative rock
to reggae
and hip-hop.
He has also been involved in edutainment
and touristic projects such as an interactive sight-seeing game network Kaland&Játék (Adventure&Game). He is author of a book on Asian gastronomy deriving from his researches in Far-Eastern culture.
The name Pierrot had originally been his nickname. He has been using this alias both as musician and game developer since 1986.
Pierrot has challenged himself in various fields of art.
In the first part of his carrier as a singer (1989–1995) he was famous of wearing a commedia dell’arte style clown
mask, covering half of his face only.
As a producer and composer, he created over 40 music albums up to 2010, including those performed by himself. A large number of his productions have gone golden and platinum in the country, with many top hits.
Pierrot established his music publisher company Private Moon Productions (1994), later Private Moon Records in 1999. They started as an independent firm, then became label of Sony Music and subsequently EMI.
In 2004-2005, as a supporter of young musicians, Pierrot was producer (and head of jury) of a singer talent show (Pop Idol) on Hungarian television (Megasztár
) and has been involved in several similar projects since then.
He became engaged in video game development in 1997 when he started his second company Private Moon Interactive – later Private Moon Studios. The initial version of AGON was born in his mind in 1998. The concept, scenario, game design, 2D graphics, sound and music have been Pierrot’s personal fields of responsibility from the start.
Yoomurjak’s Ring, a full-length interactive movie is also a Private Moon production. This FMV (full motion video) game won first prize at the Hungarian eFestival 2007 in the category of interactive story-telling.
Pierrot devotes much of his time to studying Asian culture. The motives of Chinese, Indonesian or Indian music often appear in his compositions. His book on Asian gastronomy was published in 2004 (Megkóstolni Ázsiát; publisher: Arterego, Hungary). The most outstanding manifestation of his passion for Chinese culture will be the video game AGON: The Tales of the Four Dragons.
Pierrot has also been creating real-life games for the tourism industry. His interactive sight-seeing „games” derive from the concept of the Yoomurjak’s Ring project and are linked to it by a number of elements such as time travel and the character of Jonathan Hunt, the hero of Yoomurjak’s Ring.
He studied violin and piano in school and continued private musical education thereafter. Having recognized his creativity, his teachers and instructors gave him sufficient freedom for self-development. By the time his studies were finished he was already a popular artist as a pop singer and songwriter.
From 1988 Pierrot had spent several years as musical editor at a Hungarian commercial radio channel (Danubius) where he got access to a vast source of musical material. This background helped him to establish a carrier in the music industry and to acquire skills in studio work.
His first professional band was founded in 1986 (Pierrot álma – Pierrot’s dream). A ten-year period came when he performed on stage wearing a clown-masque covering half of his face – or leaving half of it uncovered, as he prefers to put it. He challenged himself in theatre too in a number of occasions. In 1991 he composed music for the Hungarian stage adaptation of Anthony Burgess
’s Clockwork Orange and had regular multimedia-based performances in Budapest’s traditional Bábszínház puppet/marionette theatre. In 2010 he was music composer of a children’s musical based on the story of the cartoon series Popeye. (L. Darvasi – Pierrot – Ganxsta Zolee
: Popeye).
He had been producer and many times composer of several albums for other Hungarian performers including Ganxsta Zolee (hip-hop) who also appears in Pierrot’s video game Yoomurjak’s Ring and lends his voice to certain characters in AGON.
Large part of the background music in Pierrot’s games are his own compositions. The title music of Yoomurjak’s Ring, Coming Back Home is one of them, co-written with Jamie Winchester, the singer of the English version. The Hungarian version (titled Otthon), which has also been published as a stand-alone music video, is performed by Pierrot himself.
and Rand Miller
’s graphic video game Myst
. As an enthusiastic collector and reviewer, he launched a multilingual on-line adventure game magazine titled Inventory. This passion eventually drove him to make a game of his own: the idea of the AGON saga took shape in his mind in 1998. A few years later his company Private Moon Studios became one of the first game developers in Europe to release large-file graphic adventure games through the Internet (as a sequence of episodes).
In 2005 Pierrot and his team were entrusted with creating a video game as an unconventional means of promoting the touristic attractions of Eger, a Hungarian town with considerable historic background. Pierrot chose the full motion video
as the form of the game, featuring top Hungarian actors, amongst them György Bárdy (Bárdy György) who had already played the same character in a movie nearly forty years before (Egri Csillagok by Zoltán Várkonyi, 1968). Yoomurjak’s Ring was based on a popular Hungarian novel written by Géza Gárdonyi
in and about Eger
in 1899. (The book was also published in English translation under the title Eclipse of the Crescent Moon
).
Pierrot has been also involved in several types of game projects outside the video game industry. These include edutainment and board game projects as well as a network of interactive and playable sight-seeing programs for select Hungarian cities, including Eger.
Bundles:
for his first album Babaházak
1993: Hungarian Music Award (Golden Giraffe) for his music video Nekem senki nem hegedül (by Zoltán Marton)
2005: Category award for his music video Túl jól vagyok at the 2005 Kecskemét Animation Film Festival (by Miklós Weigert)
2007: First prize at eFestival in interactive strory-telling (Yoomurjak’s Ring)
2008: eFestival special award (traffic safety multimedia "Útravaló" for Eduweb, Hungary).
Budapest
Budapest is the capital of Hungary. As the largest city of Hungary, it is the country's principal political, cultural, commercial, industrial, and transportation centre. In 2011, Budapest had 1,733,685 inhabitants, down from its 1989 peak of 2,113,645 due to suburbanization. The Budapest Commuter...
, Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
) is a Hungarian game designer, musician and producer, best known internationally for his video game series AGON
AGON
AGON is a series of episodic adventure games for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows by Private Moon Studios. The game uses QuickTime VR-like panoramas in a first person camera mode. The game takes place starting in 1903.-Gameplay:...
(Ancient Games Of Nations) and Yoomurjak's Ring
Yoomurjak's Ring
Yoomurjak’s Ring is an FMV point-and-click adventure game by Private Moon Studios, designed by Hungarian game designer and musician Pierrot in 2005. The original release of the game was in Hungary in October 2006...
. He is also well known in Hungary as a musician, singer-songwriter and producer of several music albums. His own music style is primarily acoustic “adult pop”, while as a producer, he has a colorful portfolio of various styles ranging from world music
World music
World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...
to alternative rock
Alternative rock
Alternative rock is a genre of rock music and a term used to describe a diverse musical movement that emerged from the independent music underground of the 1980s and became widely popular by the 1990s...
to reggae
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...
and hip-hop.
He has also been involved in edutainment
Edutainment
Edutainment is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse.-Overview:...
and touristic projects such as an interactive sight-seeing game network Kaland&Játék (Adventure&Game). He is author of a book on Asian gastronomy deriving from his researches in Far-Eastern culture.
The name Pierrot had originally been his nickname. He has been using this alias both as musician and game developer since 1986.
Biography
Pierrot was born in Budapest in 1969 as the only child of his parents. His creativity and talent for music was realized very early. Pierrot founded his first amateur pop band when he was 14 and his public apprearences started soon after. The first studio recording took place in 1986.Pierrot has challenged himself in various fields of art.
In the first part of his carrier as a singer (1989–1995) he was famous of wearing a commedia dell’arte style clown
Pierrot
Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte whose origins are in the late 17th-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a hypocorism of Pierre , via the suffix -ot. His character in postmodern popular culture—in...
mask, covering half of his face only.
As a producer and composer, he created over 40 music albums up to 2010, including those performed by himself. A large number of his productions have gone golden and platinum in the country, with many top hits.
Pierrot established his music publisher company Private Moon Productions (1994), later Private Moon Records in 1999. They started as an independent firm, then became label of Sony Music and subsequently EMI.
In 2004-2005, as a supporter of young musicians, Pierrot was producer (and head of jury) of a singer talent show (Pop Idol) on Hungarian television (Megasztár
Megasztár
Megasztár - Voice of the Year is a Hungarian voice talent television series that started in 2003 and is currently in its fifth season, on TV2...
) and has been involved in several similar projects since then.
He became engaged in video game development in 1997 when he started his second company Private Moon Interactive – later Private Moon Studios. The initial version of AGON was born in his mind in 1998. The concept, scenario, game design, 2D graphics, sound and music have been Pierrot’s personal fields of responsibility from the start.
Yoomurjak’s Ring, a full-length interactive movie is also a Private Moon production. This FMV (full motion video) game won first prize at the Hungarian eFestival 2007 in the category of interactive story-telling.
Pierrot devotes much of his time to studying Asian culture. The motives of Chinese, Indonesian or Indian music often appear in his compositions. His book on Asian gastronomy was published in 2004 (Megkóstolni Ázsiát; publisher: Arterego, Hungary). The most outstanding manifestation of his passion for Chinese culture will be the video game AGON: The Tales of the Four Dragons.
Pierrot has also been creating real-life games for the tourism industry. His interactive sight-seeing „games” derive from the concept of the Yoomurjak’s Ring project and are linked to it by a number of elements such as time travel and the character of Jonathan Hunt, the hero of Yoomurjak’s Ring.
The musician
Pierrot has been a productive composer and music producer, creator of dozens of Hungarian top hits performed by other singers as well as himself.He studied violin and piano in school and continued private musical education thereafter. Having recognized his creativity, his teachers and instructors gave him sufficient freedom for self-development. By the time his studies were finished he was already a popular artist as a pop singer and songwriter.
From 1988 Pierrot had spent several years as musical editor at a Hungarian commercial radio channel (Danubius) where he got access to a vast source of musical material. This background helped him to establish a carrier in the music industry and to acquire skills in studio work.
His first professional band was founded in 1986 (Pierrot álma – Pierrot’s dream). A ten-year period came when he performed on stage wearing a clown-masque covering half of his face – or leaving half of it uncovered, as he prefers to put it. He challenged himself in theatre too in a number of occasions. In 1991 he composed music for the Hungarian stage adaptation of Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
’s Clockwork Orange and had regular multimedia-based performances in Budapest’s traditional Bábszínház puppet/marionette theatre. In 2010 he was music composer of a children’s musical based on the story of the cartoon series Popeye. (L. Darvasi – Pierrot – Ganxsta Zolee
Hungarian hip hop
Popular Hungarian hip hop is popular among the inner city/urban population in Hungary. Performers include a gangsta rap pioneer, Ganxsta Zolee és a Kartel, his local fellow Dopeman, LL Junior and Sub Bass Monster....
: Popeye).
He had been producer and many times composer of several albums for other Hungarian performers including Ganxsta Zolee (hip-hop) who also appears in Pierrot’s video game Yoomurjak’s Ring and lends his voice to certain characters in AGON.
Large part of the background music in Pierrot’s games are his own compositions. The title music of Yoomurjak’s Ring, Coming Back Home is one of them, co-written with Jamie Winchester, the singer of the English version. The Hungarian version (titled Otthon), which has also been published as a stand-alone music video, is performed by Pierrot himself.
The game developer
Pierrot’s devotion to adventure gaming started at his first encounter with the genre in the early 90s, especially with RobynRobyn Miller
Robyn Charles Miller co-founded Cyan Worlds with brother Rand Miller. After releasing a number of children's adventure "worlds", the brothers finally hit on a success with the computer game Myst, which remained the number one-selling game for the remainder of the 1990s...
and Rand Miller
Rand Miller
Rand Miller co-founded Cyan with brother Robyn Miller and became famous from the unexpected success of their computer game Myst, which remained the number one-selling game for the remainder of the 1990s...
’s graphic video game Myst
Myst
Myst is a graphic adventure video game designed and directed by the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller. It was developed by Cyan , a Spokane, Washington––based studio, and published and distributed by Brøderbund. The Millers began working on Myst in and released it for the Mac OS computer on September...
. As an enthusiastic collector and reviewer, he launched a multilingual on-line adventure game magazine titled Inventory. This passion eventually drove him to make a game of his own: the idea of the AGON saga took shape in his mind in 1998. A few years later his company Private Moon Studios became one of the first game developers in Europe to release large-file graphic adventure games through the Internet (as a sequence of episodes).
In 2005 Pierrot and his team were entrusted with creating a video game as an unconventional means of promoting the touristic attractions of Eger, a Hungarian town with considerable historic background. Pierrot chose the full motion video
Full motion video
Full motion video based games are video games that rely upon pre-recorded TV-quality movie or animation rather than sprites, vectors, or 3D models to display action in the game. In the early 1990s a diverse set of games utilized this format...
as the form of the game, featuring top Hungarian actors, amongst them György Bárdy (Bárdy György) who had already played the same character in a movie nearly forty years before (Egri Csillagok by Zoltán Várkonyi, 1968). Yoomurjak’s Ring was based on a popular Hungarian novel written by Géza Gárdonyi
Géza Gárdonyi
Géza Gárdonyi, born Géza Ziegler was a Hungarian writer and journalist. Although he wrote a range of works, he had his greatest success as a historical novelist, particularly with Eclipse of the Crescent Moon and Slave of the Huns.-Life:Gárdonyi was born in Agárdpuszta, Austria-Hungary, the son of...
in and about Eger
Eger
Eger is the second largest city in Northern Hungary, the county seat of Heves, east of the Mátra Mountains. Eger is best known for its castle, thermal baths, historic buildings , and red and white wines.- Name :...
in 1899. (The book was also published in English translation under the title Eclipse of the Crescent Moon
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon is a historical novel by the Hungarian writer Géza Gárdonyi. It was first published in 1899 and is one of the most popular novels in Hungary.-Background:...
).
Pierrot has been also involved in several types of game projects outside the video game industry. These include edutainment and board game projects as well as a network of interactive and playable sight-seeing programs for select Hungarian cities, including Eger.
Games
Released up to 2010:- AGON I. The London Scene (2003)
- AGON II. Adventures in Lapland (2003)
- AGON III. Pirates of Madagascar (2003)
- AGON IV. The Lost Sword of Toledo (2007)
- Yoomurjak’s Ring (2006/2009)
- AGON-The Lost Sword of Toledo Special Edition (with Strategy Guide, Concept Arts, Soundtrailer, 2010)
Bundles:
- AGON I-II-III released also as The Mysterious Codex (2006)
- AGON II-III released also as From Lapland to Madagascar (2010)
Awards
1990: eMeRTon Award by Hungarian RadioHungarian Radio
Magyar Rádió is Hungary's publicly funded radio broadcasting organization. It is also the country's official international broadcasting station...
for his first album Babaházak
1993: Hungarian Music Award (Golden Giraffe) for his music video Nekem senki nem hegedül (by Zoltán Marton)
2005: Category award for his music video Túl jól vagyok at the 2005 Kecskemét Animation Film Festival (by Miklós Weigert)
2007: First prize at eFestival in interactive strory-telling (Yoomurjak’s Ring)
2008: eFestival special award (traffic safety multimedia "Útravaló" for Eduweb, Hungary).
External links
- Interview with Private Moon Studios, developers of Agon by Just Adventure, Alexander Tait,2003
- Interview by Adventure Zone magazine, Poland, 2009 (PL)
- Interview by Adventure Zone magazine, Poland, 2009, English translation
- Interview by Adventure Classic Gaming, USA, 2010 http://www.pierrot.privatemoon.com/albumok/
- Discography