Full Sail Stories

Full Sail Recording Arts grad and Hall of Fame inductee Jonathan Mayer is a composer and recording engineer with a love for gaming. As the Music Director and Founder of Spider Farm Productions, a boutique music production company that works with video game developers, Jonathan oversees the planning, production, and execution of music for his clients’ games. The stops on his journey to Spider Farm included playing in bands, working at a recording studio, and composing music for hit games at PlayStation.

Jonathan grew up in a family of music fans and started playing the drums in middle school. He also spent a lot of time at the arcade near his house, playing the original Donkey Kong and Tron, and experimenting with stop-motion short films and sound effects at home. By the time he was in college, Jonathan was playing in bands and exploring recording equipment to make demo tapes. Signing up for an additional degree in Recording Arts at Full Sail gave him a chance to try professional studio equipment and explore the ways that music is used in different industries.

After graduation, Jonathan started working as an assistant at a recording studio in San Francisco. He had been promoted a few times when he started noticing that video game music was becoming more diverse.

“Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory [which I was playing a lot at the time] was scored by [electronic musician] Amon Tobin, who I was a huge fan of. And I kind of got obsessed with his avant-garde approach to production. There were these really elegant, sound-design-as-music constructions that Amon was doing in that game in particular. And I thought, kind of naively, ‘Well, I can do that,’” Jonathan remembers.

“I started spending a lot of my spare time outside of work in the studio trying to make my own tracks that I thought [might work in video games], or working with friends that made music to try to make things that fit into that realm,” he continues. “And then I became more and more obsessed with it and started weaning myself off session work to focus on [game music], and I ended up just making like a record’s worth of stuff.”

Leveling Up at PlayStation

Jonathan wasn’t sure how to get his new music in front of video game executives: He was cold emailing people in the industry but wasn’t getting any responses. His luck changed at the 2005 Game Developers Conference when he played his music to a panel of industry experts. The head of music at Sony PlayStation liked what Jonathan had created, and eventually Jonathan was brought on to make a custom demo for PlayStation’s Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror.

He started working on the game’s score as a composer, reworking what other composers had already written and asking the PlayStation team about the intricacies of video game music. After a while, Jonathan was offered a full-time role at PlayStation, where he worked to improve the process and the results of creating video game music.

“As a gamer, I had a lot of strong opinions about wishing that the music was more diverse in games and less repetitive or more reactive to things that were going on throughout the game. So as an editor and a mixer and stuff, I started taking that skill set and pushing it into those needs.

“At the time, they were commissioning an hour or two of music from a composer for a game that might take you 10 hours to play. And they would just take the music as composed and spread it around the game in a way that would get really repetitive over time. And I started asking questions like, ‘What if we mix this in a way that we had control over and could edit more diversity into the score?’” he says.

Jonathan’s team started taking the composed music and making dozens of variations of it to keep the game fresh as the player advanced. His team grew as they took on more and more assignments, including big titles like The Last of Us. Jonathan worked with musical themes from Academy Award-winning composer and musician Gustavo Santaolalla and Grammy-nominated composer Tim Davies to help create the game’s score.

“I was lucky to get to create some additional music for The Last of Us as a composer for some of the stealth action sequences with some of the infected [creatures] in the game and some of the humans that you do battle with. There was this real desire to create these custom horror movie string gestures and stuff that sounded unique,” he says.

Starting Spider Farm Productions

After more than 12 years working on big games at PlayStation, Jonathan moved on to a role as a Music Production Manager at Facebook. But he missed the world of game music, and in 2021 he founded his own music production company called Spider Farm Productions.

The work that Spider Farm does falls under the larger umbrella of creating audio for games, but Jonathan’s company takes a more specialized approach by focusing on a game’s music design and original score from start to finish. He has a hand in both the business and creative sides of Spider Farm.

“Everything from budgeting to personnel selection, helping a client find a composer, ensuring all the music gets recorded, mixed, edited properly, and then integrated it into the game in the right way, all falls under my responsibilities. I also have a great team to [help me].”

The first project that Jonathan’s team at Spider Farm worked on was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which was nominated for the Best Video Game Soundtrack award at the 2024 Grammys. They’ve continued to work with development teams on everything from AAA game to indie releases over the last few years, and their reputation in the game industry continues to grow.

Being Inducted into Full Sail’s Hall of Fame

Jonathan’s hard work helped him land a spot in the 15th Annual Hall of Fame inductee class. The accolade honors his career accomplishments, but Jonathan also views it as a time to celebrate his Full Sail family.

“I've always looked at the Full Sail alumni community as one of the greatest assets that I've been blessed with. When I came here on my first tour and I thought, ‘I want to go to school there,’ it was all about access to technology and education. At the time, I had no idea that I was also getting this crazy family,” he laughs.

“I've always really treasured that and valued it. And it's across the board, from Hall of Fame members that I've gotten to be friends with over the years and learned from, to recent graduates or even students. There’s just so much value in that family and in all those interactions… I take [being inducted] very seriously. I want to show up for other people the way they've shown up for me – you know, a rising tide lifts all ships. And I want to see everybody enjoy their success.”