The lightbulb moment that shaped Sound Tech grad's career
Wednesday 29 July 2026
Sound Technology graduate Andrew Coggan (2014) was on course to become a recording engineer until a "lightbulb moment" at LIPA changed everything.
A lifelong gamer, Andrew realised his passion could become a career.
Since then, he's founded Backslash Audio and created audio for some of the world's biggest games and brands, including FORTNITE, Vampire Crawlers and Taskmaster VR, as well as campaigns for Honda, Disney and LEGO.
We caught up with Andrew to discuss his journey from LIPA student to company founder, his work in game audio and why LIPA has remained a constant throughout his career.
Tell us about Backslash Audio?
Backslash Audio is a full service company that I started almost four years ago as an extension of my work as a freelance individual.
It’s been going pretty well so far. I was able to hire another LIPA grad, Leah Finnigan (who now works for Cloud Imperium Games) and over two-and-a-half years we worked on a whole bunch of different projects together.
A couple of the big ones have been a new indie game called Vampire Crawlers that was a spin-off of Vampire Survivors, which has done really, really well.
We've also worked on FORNITE as well involving a number of well-known brands such as LEGO, Honda, Mentos Mints to name a few. The latest FORNITE project was in conjunction with EPIC and Disney involving Star Wars as part of the May the 4th celebrations.
I think in total I'm up to about 30 credited projects so far spanning everything from typical video games to AR beer cans and immersive installations.
There are a growing number of LIPA grads working in the games industry, was it something you were interested in as a possible career when you were at LIPA?
I originally wanted to do traditional audio engineering, working in recording studios and then I noticed my focus just shift in between 2nd and 3rd year as I got introduced to audio post-production for film and TV. I just had one of those lightbulb moments, because I've always played games since I was a kid, and I thought, these things have sound, someone must be doing this?
The Head of Sound Tech, Jon Thornton put in touch with a LIPA grad, Simon Leary-Wood, who was working for a local developer and managed to get me an intro. This turned into two weeks work experience, which then turned into a six month contract, meaning I had to drop out of LIPA temporarily and return a year later to finish off my degree.
You now teach the Game Audio module to Sound Technology students.
I had taught for a few years on a similar module for another university in Manchester and then basically got back in touch with John Thornton to say I would really like to come back and teach at LIPA if it's a possibility. I've been teaching game audio now as an option for the third-year Sound Techs for about 8 years.
LIPA's been a constant thread throughout my work life, from kick starting it through meeting a LIPA grad, to employing one myself to now teaching.
The Sound Technology course starts off with a broad curriculum before you specialise. Have you found the skills and techniques you learnt in other areas useful to your gaming career?
There are loads of transferable skills. A lot of the techniques that we were taught for film and TV are directly applicable to games, it's just games have an extra layer of software that involves programming.
When I've worked on projects such as XR interactive and immersive installations, it's brought together everything I learned at LIPA as fundamentally these were not that dissimilar to how theatre shows work.
There’s definitely a strong understanding and knowledge base that you gain from first and second year that does end up coming back around.
What's your favourite memories of your time at LIPA?
There are so many, but one that comes to mind is from my second year when I'd started getting into film audio. One of our assignments was to re-record all the audio and dialogue for a film clip we were given. It included dialogue from an older character and I didn't know who I was going to get to record it. Then as I was heading to the studio I bumped into Mark Featherstone-Witty (LIPA's Founding Principal) and asked him, have you got 10 minutes? So, he came into the studio and worked his way through the script and did a great job. I think he really enjoyed it!
I didn't tell anyone, handed it in and a few weeks later Jon Thornton said to me, that voice at the end, is it Mark? I think that sums up LIPA, it's such a close knit community and there's always someone you can go to for help or guidance.
What are you working on at the moment?
Unfortunately, I'm not able to talk about them! Most the projects I work on are confidential until they are released. But I am extremely busy at the minute, let's just say that!
