Meet the team: Friedrich Klemme 🇩🇪

Co-founder & Audio Director, Germany

Guten Tag, everybody!

I’m Friedrich and funny enough, I never planned to work in video games. I had a Commodore C64 when I was 16, played for a while, then left games behind for a decade. Back then, my heart was in music — recording bands, playing analog card games like Skat or Doppelkopf (if you’re German, you know 😏).

I studied audio and video engineering and financed my way through school with all sorts of “multimedia jobs”: live audio mixing, camera work for an American sales TV station, broadcast engineering… the works.

One day, while I was mixing in my apartment, my neighbor came over to complain about the noise — and ended up changing my life. I learned that he had been working on the Monkey Island localization, and that a friend of his was in need of an audio engineer for game voice recordings. I needed money… and the rest is history.

Twenty years later, I’ve done less music than I’d hoped, but I’ve found my home in game localization. First at t-recs, and later as a co-founder of Native Prime. What I love most about NP? Not just what we do, but how we do it — with care, humor, and a team that feels like family (most of the time 😄).

When it comes to challenges, it’s hard to pick just one — I’ve always enjoyed projects that push me in different ways. Maybe my biggest personal challenge right now is learning all the bass lines from the last three Tool albums. I’m still miles away from mastering them… but hey, maybe I’ll get there in 10,000 days.

I still play in two bands these days, though I try to just be a musician there — no sound engineering, no mixing, just pure fun. We mostly play Punk Rock and Ska, which keeps things loud and lively.

And outside of work (and music), I love simple things: long walks in the park with a podcast, cooking, playing computer games or backgammon, and binge-watching series when I need to switch my brain off.

And since you’ve made it all the way here, you should know — getting me to actually write all this down might have been the biggest challenge of them all. 😉

Cheers!