From Games to Music

Meanwhile, Gol was being drawn into the music scene by applications like 

Hammerhead and Rebirth 338. He had the idea of merging both into a step

sequencer with rows and steps, so he started developing FruityLoops.

When he dropped it on our machines it was a simple, midi-only Step Sequencer 

that we really couldn't place our existing product range leaving us scratching our 

heads how to market it.
This turned out not to be a problem as people went WILD about it and sucked our 

servers dry (downloading the demo) days after launch. It was also around this time 

we came up with the idea of Lifetime Free Updates for the program, that existing 

customers should get the latest version of the software for free.

The first couple of years were pretty tough as there were hardly any sales and we 

always had to beg people to host the demo on their servers (thanks Maz!). 

To generate some additional income, Gol developed an EJay type program called 

FruityTracks that was "OEMed" for Mattel into Pro-DJ (for France & UK) 

and Radio 538 Music Machine (for Holland & Belgium). During this time 

FruityLoops slowly grew from a simple midi drum machine into the fully featured

virtual studio that a wide rage of musicians are using today.