Jake Kaufman is a popular fan arranger, demoscene musician, and professional video game composer. While growing up in Miami, Kaufman studied classical theory, learned to play multiple instruments, and gained experience in synthesis and programming. As a big fan of video games while growing up, he intended to one day score an RPG. In 1998, he compiled a full-length soundtrack for the imaginery video game Forgotten Tides to demonstrate his versatility. He initially used this project as a commercial demo to establish himself within the industry. He has since developed his musical and technical approaches further with numerous original compositions and other demo material.

Since 1999, Kaufman has worked on commercial game projects. He initially created the music and sound effects for Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance projects by companies such as WayForward Productions and Paragon 5. After scoring happy platformer music on M&M's Mini Madness and Q*Bert, he went on to demonstrate his versatility on games such as Godzilla: Domination, Rugrats, David Beckham Soccer, and Scurge: Hive. He surprisingly enjoyed the challenges of working under the technical limitations of these projects, noting Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Karnaaj Rally, and Micro Machines as particularly demanding. He is especially proud of his work for Shantae from this era.

Kaufman initially came to recognition for his contributions to the fan arrangement community under the pseudonym virt. He has worked for over seven years creating albums with the demoscene label Hellven. In 2002, he set up the classic video game remix website VGMix as an alternative to OverClocked Remix. VGMix uses reviews and ratings to assess the quality of submissions rather than using judges to accept or reject them. The initially successful site has been closed due to multiple security attacks since 2006, though may relaunch for the second time later this year. He continues to participate in fan projects such as the NES sound chip tribute FX3 released under 8bitpeoples.

In recent years, Kaufman has been involved in several more high-profile and unrestricted projects. He demonstrated promise as a console game composer when scoring Extreme Roller and implemented exuberant live guitars on Tennis Masters Series. Most prominently, he produced an hour of Asian-influenced orchestral music for the PlayStation 2's The Legend of Kay in 2005. In 2007, he made his film debut wth the game parody Press Start humorously mixing his game music styles with epic orchestration. He has also recently scored TMNT and the internationally acclaimed retro score to Contra 4 for the DS. Driven by his extreme passion for music, Kaufman has clearly made many impressive contributions to the official and fan-arranged game music.