Eveline Fischer was born in 1969 in Christchurch, Hampshire, England. She studied piano, church organ, and violin. She pursued formal music education at Durham University, followed by a Master's in Medieval Music at Newcastle University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Electroacoustic Composition at Bournemouth University. Her training was academic and classical, aimed at concert halls and compositional research — not game cartridges.
In 1993, a company called Rare, based in the small village of Twycross in Leicestershire, placed a job listing. They were expanding into Super Nintendo Entertainment System development and needed someone to handle audio production. Rare had never had a dedicated in-house musician before. Fischer responded. She was hired as the company's first.
There was one problem. She had never made a game before. She had never played many, either. Her background was medieval chant and electroacoustic composition, not platformers or side-scrollers. So Rare gave her a stack of SNES cartridges and one instruction: spend a week playing them. Learn what a game is.
She played for a week. At the end of it, she began composing. Her first project was Donkey Kong Country, working alongside David Wise and Robin Beanland. She contributed seven tracks, including 'Simian Segue,' 'Treetop Rock,' and 'Voices of the Temple.' The game sold millions. The music became part of what people remembered.
When Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! was in production, David Wise was already occupied with another project — one that would ultimately go unreleased. Fischer was called on to compose the majority of the soundtrack. She wrote most of it. The Game Boy Advance port years later would replace her music due to difficulties converting it to the system's sound chip, but the original SNES version — the one players heard first — carried her work.
She also did something else at Rare. In the late 1990s, the studio was developing a first-person shooter called Perfect Dark, centered on a secret agent named Joanna Dark. Rare had its own state-of-the-art recording studio, so there were no usual studio time constraints. Fischer voiced the character. She was not a professional voice actress. She was a composer who happened to have a voice that fit. The character became iconic. When Perfect Dark Zero was released in 2005 for the Xbox 360, the voice was replaced by Laurence Bouvard, who gave Joanna a more Americanized accent. Players noticed the difference. The original voice — Fischer's voice — was the one they had first known.
In 2005, Fischer completed voice work for Kameo: Elements of Power for the Xbox 360. In January 2007, she left Rare. She has not been involved in the video game industry since. According to sources, she became a mother and chose to step away. Eveline Novakovic, as she is now known after marriage, gave few interviews during her career and has remained largely out of public view since her departure.
She was Rare's first in-house musician. She learned what a game was in one week. By the end of that week, she was writing music the world would hum. She composed for years, voiced a character who became a face of a console generation, and then walked away. The work remains. The question is quieter: when you are handed something unfamiliar and told to learn it in seven days, what becomes possible by the eighth?