Eveline Novakovic

Eveline Novakovic (née Fischer) is a British musician, sound engineer, video game music composer and voice actress formerly employed by Rare Ltd. for their music department, where she worked together with Robin Beanland and David Wise as a close-knit team. Her first work at Rare and the video game industry in general was composing a part of the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack and more notably, the majority of Donkey Kong Country 3's. From 1997 towards departure in 2007, she leaned to creating sound effects and voice acting.

Before Rare Ltd.
Novakovic's musical education prior to joining Rare was “essentially classical,” having studied piano, church organ, and violin. As her father introduced her to new genres and artists, she developed an appreciation and was given an opportunity to discover different types of music. Having played in a youth orchestra, her enthusiasm grew with concerts in some of the great venues in London and trips playing abroad.

This was followed by five years at universities - first studying music at Durham, earning a Master's degree in medieval music at Newcastle, and a postgraduate diploma in Electroacoustic Composition at Bournemouth University, which was the eventual stepping stone to her position at Rare. She found piecing images with music and sound effects enjoyable, and immersed herself in as varied a musical background as possible. She drew inspiration from film soundtracks of ', ' and ''.

At Rare Ltd.
When Eveline went for the interview at Rare, the company which was still a small business, it was just as they were opening their in-house music department. Unlike David Wise who as a freelancer had been working with Rare for four years and was well established in the industry, Eveline was brand new to composing video game music. The entire process to creating SNES tracks was painstakingly writing it all in HEX, which was far from intuitive, so David took on something of a role of her senior and mentor. Despite the challenge, it gave them a lot of creative freedom as they were not tied to notes on a page.

David Wise took the lead and composed most of Donkey Kong Country, Robin Beandland contributed "Funky’s Fugue", and Eveline Novakovic was responsible for seven tracks, including the iconic "Simian Segue" and more atmospheric tracks like "Treetop Rock", "Voices of the Temple" and "Northern Hemispheres". She discovered early on that she was happiest writing the more atmospheric music. She sought to give each stage "a sense of place and momentum". After Donkey Kong Country, she jumped at the chance to compose for the licensed game Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run in an opportunity to branch out and try something new, while Wise solely took on Donkey Kong Country 2.

The music department's driver for innovation was trying to create audio "hopefully as equally impressive as the graphics" of the Donkey Kong games. Novakovic followed her debut work by composing majority of Donkey Kong Country 3's soundtrack as Wise was busy working on Project Dream (later retooled into Banjo-Kazooie). Being aware of the success and iconicity of the previous two installments, she decided to "rethink" her approach to music, introducing more musical genres and creating "a drive to keep the player moving on." She next composed for the Game Boy follow-up counterpart Donkey Kong Land III and rearranged Robin Beanland's tracks from Twelve Tales: Conker 64 into Conker's Pocket Tales.

Since Diddy Kong Racing onwards, she gravitated more towards sound effects and ambiences/soundscapes. She describes creating them "a creative and imaginative process." Novakovic also served as the voice actress for a number of characters in Rare games, including Joanna Dark, the main protagonist of Perfect Dark. In 2007, she left Rare and retired from the video game industry.