Pan Athen
aka Panos Kouvelis
Born in 1976, Pan Athen (real name Panos Kouvelis) started playing with tape recorders since early childhood, mangling voice recordings from his toddler sister.
As a teenager he discovered the limitless world of creativity in the form of personal computers and he started creating his own game development and music production tools using Assembly and Pascal on DOS running on an 8086 processor and a CGA graphics card. At the same time he joined various thrash metal bands as a guitarist and vocalist and started to take interest in music production.
Combining both his interests, he started producing music using trackers as the ‘sound guy’ and joined local game developer teams as the ‘sound guy’.
Adulthood came with formal training in audio engineering and a career in music production, game audio, and teaching all those under the discipline of sound design.
Since then, Pan pursues a career divided between research and development of interactive audio content and technologies, applied audio engineering and sound design for the music and game industries, instructional design, and teaching.
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Currently, Pan Athen is leading SoundFellas, designing sound libraries and software tools for commercial release. At the same time he develops online courses for sound designers, audio engineers and music producers, soon to be publicly available. He is also preparing the material for 2 books on game audio and sound design.
He continues to pursue elegance in sound design through research, strategic partnerships and his work through various committees and associations.
Past highlights
- As an independent music producer for Black Lotus Records, together with the metal band “On Thorns I Lay” he co-produced the iconic album “Egocentric” that set their style for the contemporary era of the heavy metal genre.
- As the audio director and lead sound designer for local indie software house “CodeDark”, he created the first interactive soundtrack and stochastic sound effects engine and tools for video games produced in Greece.
- As a technology consultant and, later, department director for the local optical medium production giant ODiTec S.A, he set up a complete industrial department of optical glass mastering, hired and trained all personnel, and delivered a high profit yield industrial unit that received a European award.
- As an audio production expert and musician, he becomes the author of the “Technical” column in the local music technology magazine “Modern Music Studio”.
- As an instructional designer and later course coordinator and department head for the SAE Creative Media College of Athens, he designed, setup and delivered the first Game Production and Game Development undergraduate courses in Greece. The courses still run successfully, supplying the local and international industries and academia with highly trained students.
- As an audio director he managed all audio related projects of local game development house Aventurine S.A. and its flagship product “Darkfall Online” and all later editions. Apart from training and establishing the internal audio department he also managed all outsourcing that was needed for audio production and the development of proprietary audio software and technical artistry tools, to support a massive open world online multiplayer RPG. To not lose touch with his art, he managed to continue creating sound effects and writing music for Darkfall and other house titles, apart from being the director.
- As an entrepreneur and together with Manolis Benetos and Antonis Koutelias, he started SoundFellas in an effort to unite various local recording studios, sound designers and music producers, that faced economic crisis, under a highly focused production pipeline, specialized for game audio and film sound. SoundFellas grew to also include proprietary research in the fields of sound design and also software development for audio production tools focused on the games and film production professionals.
- As an inventor, he conceived, designed and developed together with Manolis Benetos, Antonis Koutelias and Antonis Ventouris, the first interactive and augmented audio app for mobile called “DMDJ”. The app was released at the same time with the first iPhone, and is used to generate procedural soundscapes that augment the experience of pen-and-paper RPG board game players. DMDJ is still commercially available for smartphones and tablets, through Blueface Games and the Apple, Google and Amazon app stores.
- Through various affiliations, he delivers free short courses and open lectures on the topics of sound design and game audio whenever he gets the chance, in order to introduce the concepts of creativity and productivity, and share the beauty of music and sound in our lives and the quality that they can bring to the society.
- As a member of an international committee of experts in education and video game related professionals, he developed a big part of the curricula for undergraduate courses in game development, game design and game production, for the SAE colleges around Europe. The curricula was accepted and accredited from Middlesex University and the Ministries of Education of 10 European countries with success.
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