While play-testing, Tallarico often petitioned his bosses to let him create video game music. Since he had never produced video game music before, Tallarico offered to write the music for free in his spare time. Tallarico's first musical project at Virgin Interactive was for the Nintendo Game Boy version of "Prince of Persia". The resulting music, a "plodding, ominous synth" as a soundtrack, impressed Virgin enough that they let him continue to make music, making him head of the audio division six months later. Given the constraints on video game cartridges, Tallarico focused on making catchy—but short—MIDI melodies that could be looped repeatedly. "The main focus of writing video game music back then was it had to be simple and have a great melody," Tallarico said. Tallarico advocated for more space on cartridges being devoted to audio, and became an early pioneer in bringing real sampled sounds of instruments into video games.