Pierrot (Tamás Z. Marosi)

Pierrot, born Tamás Zoltán Marosi (3 September 1969, in Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian pop singer, 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 tourism projects such as an interactive sight-seeing game network Kaland&Játék (Adventure&Game). He is author of a book on Asian gastronomy and a series of novels. The name Pierrot had originally been his nickname. He has been using this alias both as musician and game developer since 1986.

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 career 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) as well as jury member of the national and international Eurovision Song Contest in 2015 and 2016.

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.

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 career 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.

Pierrot’s devotion to adventure gaming started at his first encounter with the genre in the early 1990s, especially with Robyn 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 tourist 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). A sequel to the game was released in 2015 titled MIAZMA or the Devil's Stone (MIAZMA avagy az ördög köve) in Hungarian, also with Jonathan Hunt as protagonist.

Pierrot has been also involved in several types of game projects outside the computer 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.

Under his real name Tamas Z. Marosi, Pierrot was co-author of a Hungarian rock music manual covering the era 1950-1993.

As a fan of Asian culture, he was author of book on the gastronomy of India, China, Indonesia and Thailand. The book featured his collection of recipes and some of his own photos. (Atrerego, Budapest, 2005).

Upon the success of the game Yoomurjak's Ring Pierrot launched a series of novels under the title Jonathan Hunt Adventures in 2011. He has been working with co-writers on the novels. The protagonist is Jonathan Hunt, the American journalist who settles in Hungary and gets involved in various investigations. The plots are set in major historical places of Hungary. The books published so far in the series: Jumurdzsák gyűrűje (Yoomurjak's Ring, co-written with Sándor Szélesi, 2011), Az ördög köve (Devil's Stone, co-written with Endre Gábor, 2012) and Magister M (co-written with Endre Gábor,2013). The series is in Hungarian, published by Alexandra, Hungary.

Pierrot presented 24 of his own classic board game illustrations in a large-size, playable album in 2011. The book features the three game boards already known from his AGON adventure games and in the iPad series (Tablut, Fanorona, Alquerque and The Royal Game of Ur) as well as several others with a brief history and rules of play. (Published in Hungarian by Alexandra)

Released up to 2015:

• 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)
• Ancient Games Of Nations - series of traditional board games for iPad (The Royal Game of Ur, Alquerque)
• MIAZMA or the Devil's Stone (MIAZMA avagy az ördög köve) (2015)
• Destination: Treasure Island (Irány a Kincses Sziget!) - tabletop board game (December 2016)

Bundles:

• AGON I-II-III released also as The Mysterious Codex (2006)
• AGON II-III released also as From Lapland to Madagascar (2010)

• Megkóstolni Ázsiát (Taste Asia, Arterego, 2005)
• Jonathan Hunt Adventures
  • Jumurdzsák gyűrűje (Yoomurjak's Ring; Pierrot-Szélesi Sándor; Alexandra, 2011)
  • Az ördög köve (Devil's Stone; Pierrot-Gábor Endre; Alexandra, 2012)
  • Magister M (Pierrot-Gábor Endre; Alexandra, 2013)
• AGON - 24 táblajáték a nagyvilágból (24 board games of the world; Alexandra, 2012)

1990: eMeRTon Award by Hungarian Radio 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).