How much credit can you give a tool for creating art? Surely it's like praising the paintbrush for a great painting, or the typewriter for a best-selling novel. And to an extent, that's the case with the humble DAW – after all, the idea at least is that they're just a series of tools to turn ideas into creations, as seamlessly as possible. But for FruityLoops, later FL Studio, it found itself at the core of the conversation across the development of multiple genres and styles all across the world. Genres and sounds that went on to define and shape electronic music – and pop culture – more than once. This is the story of FL's unique beginnings, why it continually found itself at the crossroads of sonic innovations and why community has come to define “the most influential beat program since the MPC”.

In Their Own Image

In 1995, two Belgian programmers called Jean-Marie Cannie and Frank Van Biesen left their jobs at Pavell Software, creating computer programs tracking the stock market, to try their hand at videogames. Spotting a niche in the market, their first was called Porntris – an adult version of Tetris – that was sold on floppy disks via classified ads in the back of Computer Magazine. “Surprisingly enough, this caught on and people asked for more,” Jean-Marie Cannie told the anti-piracy lobby group IMSTA in 2008. “We decided to do a CD-ROM and got [into] bed with Private, one of the bigger players in the adult games market.” The result was a series of interactive, 18-plus, games that led them to enter the ‘Da Vinci’ contest, a global competition hosted by IBM, aimed at finding the next big coders and software developers.

Cannie and Van Biesen’s new company Image-Line re-coded one of their Private games to make it less ‘private’, mailed it in and won first prize in the ‘Multimedia’ category. But something else caught their wandering eye at the ‘Da Vinci’ contest — a 19-year-old developer who quietly scooped up both the ‘Game’ and ‘Overall’ prizes. The duo immediately approached Didier ‘Gol’ Dambrin to convince him to work for them. “Didier was home at the time with benefits and was not exactly looking for a job,” Cannie told Vice Belgium in 2017. It wasn’t until Cannie offered to buy him a new computer that Dambrin took the bait and joined the small, dynamic company.

The Birth of Fruity Loops

Gol’s first game for Image-Line was a gory shoot-em-up called Private Investigator. In it, you play as Dick Slammer, investigating a case of adultery on behalf of a client. The game was so fun rapper Ice-T reportedly yelled ‘This game beats cocaine!’ at a convention in Las Vegas in 1996. It was unchartered territory for video games as home computers grew in CPU and the new company was up for trying anything.