Mark Benis is a multimedia composer and game developer whose love for catchy Game Boy music has inspired him beyond anything he could have imagined.
His orchestral score to Francisco González’s detective adventure game Lamplight City was nominated for a Game Audio Network Guild Award for “Best Original Choral Composition”. Continuing his collaboration with González, Mark scored Western adventure game Rosewater starring an all-star cast of voice actors like Cissy Jones, Christian Lanz and Dave Fennoy. His music has been placed in TV shows worldwide including franchises like Masterchef and The Bachelor.
In video game development, Mark was a co-owner of Bonte Avond where he developed Everybody Wham Wham and Once Upon a Jester, which won an Independent Games Festival (IGF) award. While there he acted in a variety of roles like sound design, dialogue editing, voice acting and marketing, and he collaborated with content creators like Karl Jacobs, CORPSE and FoolishGamers.
As an audio programmer Mark has contributed additional audio implementation to MachineGames’ and Arkane Lyon’s first-person shooter Wolfenstein: Youngblood. As a dialogue editor he worked on Nighthawks, a vampire-themed adventure game written by Richard Cobbett and produced by Wadjet Eye Games.
Currently Mark is scoring IceToad Studio’s upcoming mirror puzzle game AiliA, featuring Chinese instruments like xiao and erhu recorded with renowned musicians Zac Zinger and Andy Lin.
Mark studied at Brown University where he received a Bachelor’s in Music and Chemical Engineering, and he later received a Master’s in Screen Scoring from New York University. He resides in the United Kingdom and travels between the London Area and New York.