From 1993 to 1994, Melillo worked as a composer and sound designer at Absolute Entertainment in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Working within the limitations of 59K (kilobytes) for all music and sound, he composed and sound-designed 11 video games for several platforms, including Sega Genesis and Nintendo. He was also a stunt double in the “Penn & Teller” game.
On December 29th, 1993, Melillo composed music for the 1994 NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Convention. Absolute Entertainment’s video editor had put together a demo/show of random game screens. While asked by the editor to "add some guitar” for the presentation, Melillo went much further, rendering Rise of the Robots as a dramatic score. This provided the illusion of a story emerging from initially disparate video clips.
(This was/is the FIRST time anything like this had been done.)
According to Absolute's president, “lines of people waited to see the presentation”. Rise of the Robots was a monumental success at the convention. This led to the dissemination of a VHS tape of the production to numerous filmmakers and video-game designers.
On the outside of the 1993-1994-1995 VHS demo box, it read, “The Future of Game-Music is Film Scoring.”
The impact of Rise of the Robots at the 1994 NAMM show set the stage for a “film-scoring” approach to writing music for video games, foreshadowing and influencing the transition from 59K to the eventual recording of a live orchestra.
At that time, Melillo’s use of the MIDI orchestra (using inexpensive sound modules from that era) inspired the next three decades of game-music composers in the areas of style, harmonic vocabulary, orchestrations, rhythmic constructs, and transitional devices.
An example is Melillo’s Last Outpost of Freedom, which was later scored for young band and embedded within the STORMQUEST series. His 1994 MIDI demonstration of film music for video games, provided to the Absolute Entertainment CEO was called Super Battle Tank at the time.
Despite the initial success of Absolute Entertainment, its eventual demise and bankruptcy led to Melillo’s dissolution with the company at 3:33 PM on February 4th, 1994. It was then that he returned to his home in Ramsey, New Jersey, and decided to make STORMWORKS his full-time commitment.