| File | | STIL Commentary | |
|---|
| Arkanoid.sid | | This is the very first published tune on the C64 that used samples.
"I'm glad you spotted 'Cobra' on the Spectrum, whose tune I was in
love with and HAD to use somewhere else...! I figured no-one would
complain if I used it a year later on the C64." (MG) (It got used in
Arkanoid.)
"Q: How did you get involved with using sampled sounds?
MG: I figured out how samples were played by hacking into someone
else's code... OK, I admit it... It was a drum synthesizer package
called Digidrums, actually, so you could still say I was the first to
include samples in a piece of music. [...] Never would I claim to have
invented that technique, I just got it published first. In fact, I
couldn't really figure out where they got the sample data, just that
they were wiggling the volume register, so I tried to make up my own
drum sample sounds in realtime - which is the flatulence stuff that
shipped in 'Arkanoid'. [...] After the project was in the shops I
gained access to some real drum samples, and I slid those into my own
custom version of the tune. The one that's in the shops is kind of a
collage of farts & burps, don't you think? [...] Later I was able to
acquire some proper drum samples and by 'Game Over' it got quite
sophisticated." (MG)
|
| Arkanoid_PSID.sid | | This is the very first published tune on the C64 that used samples.
"I'm glad you spotted 'Cobra' on the Spectrum, whose tune I was in
love with and HAD to use somewhere else...! I figured no-one would
complain if I used it a year later on the C64." (MG) (It got used in
Arkanoid.)
"Q: How did you get involved with using sampled sounds?
MG: I figured out how samples were played by hacking into someone
else's code... OK, I admit it... It was a drum synthesizer package
called Digidrums, actually, so you could still say I was the first to
include samples in a piece of music. [...] Never would I claim to have
invented that technique, I just got it published first. In fact, I
couldn't really figure out where they got the sample data, just that
they were wiggling the volume register, so I tried to make up my own
drum sample sounds in realtime - which is the flatulence stuff that
shipped in 'Arkanoid'. [...] After the project was in the shops I
gained access to some real drum samples, and I slid those into my own
custom version of the tune. The one that's in the shops is kind of a
collage of farts & burps, don't you think? [...] Later I was able to
acquire some proper drum samples and by 'Game Over' it got quite
sophisticated." (MG)
|
| Athena.sid | | The one that drove Galway insane was "'Athena', because after some
years of increasing sound quality in the music, I finally had to come
down... I only had 4K in which to fit the code and music." (MG)
Tunes 2-6 appear to be covers of the arcade original.
|
| Combat_School.sid | | |
| Combat_School_PSID.sid | | |
| Comic_Bakery.sid | | Tune #1 was also in the game "Top Gun".
"The only thing I have to say about it is that the title tune started
off as a cover of 'Hot Water' by Level 42 (oh yeah add them to my
favourite music list). It went badly awry by the end of the 1st 10
seconds though and I decided to change it to something else!" (MG)
|
| Daley_Thompsons_Decathlon.sid | | This version has been used by 20th Century Fox since 1954.
|
| Game_Over.sid | | |
| Game_Over_PSID.sid | | |
| Green_Beret.sid | | Covers tunes from the arcade game of "Green Beret" except for tune #1
and possibly tune #10.
"Most of the arcade games we worked on has simpler sound chips than
the C64's, so I was able to 'beef up the music'". (MG)
|
| Helikopter_Jagd.sid | | "I was still freelancing when I worked on that music first in 1984,
and I just said to Tony Pomfret 'what do you want for the music?' to
which he replied 'I want the B-side from the Limahl single
"Neverending Story" I bought the other day.' At no time were we
thinking Ocean would publish a "Neverending Story" game, it was very
much just a cool tune to do. (It was a Georgio Moroder filler tune,
whose style I had a lot of respect for as a producer). It was the
first tune I did pulse-width sweeps on, but didn't get released 'til
after a bunch of other games had come out I think. The sound blew
everyone away." (MG)
|
| Highlander.sid | | According to Galway, it took him two days to do this tune.
|
| Hunchback_II.sid | | "Bill [Barna] & Tony [Pomfret] convinced me to stay up overnight with
them finishing 'Hunchback 2' on a cold night in November 1984 so they
could get their bonuses! (I didn't get a cut of those bonuses
though... HEY!) I had never been up overnight before and it was a new
experience, especially since I had to get to college the following
day..." (MG)
|
| Hyper_Sports.sid | | Tunes #1 to #24 and #26 are covers of the arcade version.
|
| Insects_in_Space.sid | | "I am sorry to see that most composers these days don't have access to
the kind of tricks I was able to do (being a programmer), which for
example allowed me to create the 'buzzing bees' effect at the
beginning of the tune. Too bad, eh?"
"Well by the time I got to that game (1988) I was a bit hard up for
ideas. I didn't know what to do with so few notes available! I wanted
my tunes to build up into much larger entities but I always hit this
limit. Plus the time at which that game was developed was a pretty
rough time for Sensi, none of us were too happy at the time. Insects
In Space was a victim of this. True though, it certainly has
'character', but it just doesn't go on LONG enough, don't you agree?"
(MG)
|
| Kong_Strikes_Back.sid | | |
| Match_Day.sid | | The title music from the British BBC TV football programme, "Match of
the Day".
|
| Miami_Vice.sid | | "The Miami Vice game was a very quick job. I had been handed 'Miami
Vice' and 'Highlander' because the outside development team working on
it hadn't worked out who was going to do the sound (notice those games
have little or no sound-effects), so I did my best in a very short
time. I [...] picked 'The Chase' and the 'Main Theme' as the two tunes
I would do. We had settled on two modes for the game - in your car and
out of it I think. (Or maybe it was in the game and out of it, I can't
remember.) I started on 'The Chase' and if you listen to the first few
seconds of that you can hear the basis of that super-filter-echo tune
that is so cool. I recall David Collier was sitting in the office with
me while I was working on it. But while messing with it while everyone
else was at lunch, I came across this cool sound. I added to it and
added to it, and when we applied the non-sync'd filter sweep we both
flipped out! I decided to abandon the conversion of that tune and
simply go with the cool sounds I had stumbled upon. When the guys came
back from lunch and listened to it they swore that there was a
cassette deck connected somewhere and it wasn't the C64 playing it!
Such a sound had not been heard before by any of us out of the C64. So
I extended it and turned it into this tripping-out 11-minute piece.
The main theme itself... I simply did my best with no drums (Rob
Hubbard's strength). I think my strength with guitar solos helped pull
it off. Both of those problematic games benefited from my music,
actually, and the Ocean management were very relieved
(understatement)." (MG)
|
| Microprose_Soccer_indoor.sid | | These are the tunes from the indoor game of Microprose Soccer. Also,
see comment for /Galway_Martin/Microprose_Soccer_outdoor.sid.
|
| Microprose_Soccer_int_PSID.sid | | |
| Microprose_Soccer_intro.sid | | |
| Microprose_Soccer_outdoor.sid | | "Well, a tune could only be hard to compose if I was hard-up for ideas
at the time - if it was a conversion/arrangement of someone else's
music it wouldn't be composition, right? 'Microprose Soccer' and
'Insects In Space' were the toughest, by that definition." (MG)
|
| Mikie.sid | | All tunes are covers of the arcade version (except maybe tune #1?).
|
| Never_Ending_Story.sid | | |
| Ocean_Loader_1.sid | | "The 'version 1' is a real tune, it was really like that on
Hypersports and maybe one or two other games before Comic Bakery
(Cyclone would have used it, for example, but it was never released by
Ocean). The delay at 02:03.00 really is supposed to be a delay of 4
beats." (MG)
Because of the delay Martin mentioned at 2:03, it led a lot of people
to believe later parts of the tune went out of synch and it was
bugged. However, this has been confirmed as intentional. This version
was known to have been used in Hyper Sports and Transformers.
|
| Ocean_Loader_2.sid | | "'version 2' was a reworking of that tune that I did in late 1985 for
Comic Bakery. There was actually supposed to be separate loading music
for every game - that was my plan. However, I was running out of time
on projects and in the case of C.B. I simply reworked an older piece.
After that I _really_ didn't have time to mess with it, and it stuck
in universal use. Rambo was the only one that got its own loading
music as part of this plan." (MG)
This version was in use for many Ocean/Imagine games from late 1985 to
mid 1987.
|
| Parallax.sid | | Before starting on this game Galway bought Rendez-vous (by Jean Michel
Jarre). He listened to it daily. His CD player broke 2 weeks later and
didn't get repaired for 2 months, during which time Martin worked on
Parallax, without realizing that Rendez-vous was unconsciously
creeping into the music. He realized it only after he played the album
again after the game was already shipped.
"[Parallax] was 11 minutes long, certainly my longest at the time. I
took my development gear home to work on it for a week or two. I just
said to myself 'OK, it's going to be this mega-tune, so the intro has
to be mega'. The intro took up two-thirds of the tune! I actually got
bored with it, and stuck that silly melody on the end which doesn't
really match. Going back I would have made it less melodic. I wanted
to reflect the gigantic visual proportions represented by the parallax
effect in the game so that's why it has an 'epic' feel."(MG)
|
| Ping_Pong.sid | | "Can't quite remember what happened with 'Ping Pong'. I seem to
remember not having very much time to work on it. I do recall working
late on it after everyone else had left, because perhaps I was going
on holiday the next day or something. (Was it around September-1987?)
The arcade game didn't have any music on the 'press start' screen, so
it would have been a natural for an original tune. Maybe everyone
regarded it as a 'baby game' which didn't merit much attention. CAN'T
QUITE REMEMBER, sorry!" (MG)
|
| Rambo_First_Blood_Part_II.sid | | The Morse-code heard in voice 1 at the start of the tune spells out
the names of the games' creators. The decoded Morse-code is below.
The (*) denotes where the tone of the Morse-code drops. The spelling
is slightly incorrect, letter 'i' always translates as an 'e'.
"I wrote that morse code program myself. Nobody touched it but me. It
was written to handle any text. And I spelt the text right! So - if
you're right - the problem must have been the software. I'm assuming
my morsecode book was right of course ;)" (MG)
-...|.|.-..|.-..|-...|.-|.-.|-.|.-|
B E L L B A R N A (Bill Barna)
-..|.-|...-|.|-..|-.-.|---|.-..|.-..|.|.|.-.|
D A V E D C O L L E E R (David Collier)
--|.-|.-.|-|.|-.|--.|(*).-|.-..|.--|.-|-.--|
M A R T E N G A L W A Y (Martin Galway)
-|---|-.|-.--|.--.|---|--|..-.|.-.|.|-|
T O N Y P O M F R E T (Tony Pomfret)
..(*).|-|.|...-|.|.--|.-|....|.|-..
S T E V E W A H E D (Steve Wahid)
|
| Rastan.sid | | Covers arcade version.
"The most difficult adaption of a piece of music from a game was the
Rastan Saga music, that took a while to get all fitted into three
channels."
"[...] it was really hard to fit all that stuff on the C64,
particularly since the dynamic range of arcade game music was starting
to rise at last, something which the C64 doesn't have much of. (I
always had that problem with movie conversions of course.)"(MG)
|
| Rolands_Ratrace.sid | | "Once I had finished on 'Roland's Rat Race', which took a month,
[Ocean] agreed to suspend my tasks as a programmer and my employment
as game sound guy began." (MG)
"[...] the sounds are a bit poor. I didn't develop pulse-width
modulation until the next project, which at the time was called
'Cyclone'. It later came out as 'Helicopter Jagd'. On 'Roland's Rat
Race' I guess you could say I was still mastering the C64. It was
January/February 1985, my first project on staff at Ocean (I had done
quite a few before that as a freelancer but they weren't comfortable
employing someone SOLELY TO DO MUSIC... those were the days!)." (MG)
|
| Short_Circuit.sid | | "I believe it to be my most elaborate, complete and successful
conversion of a 'digital audio sourced' tune. ZZAP! 64 only gave the
music 79%, my worst score since 'Roland's Rat Race', so you can
imagine my disappointment. One of the other tunes was easy, that's the
simple ballad melody 'come and follow me', which I was able to arrange
quite successfully. The other one was a nightmare since it's the tune
right from the beginning of the movie with all the robotic short notes
& arpeggios. The tune just built up so massive that the poor C64 was
short of notes by about 30 seconds into it, so I had to fudge the end
a bit and make it repeat, basically." (MG)
|
| Slap_Fight.sid | | Covers arcade version except for tune #1.
"I didn't have much memory space, I believe around 5 or 6K, so I was
delighted to copy the arcade game exactly, which had very simple
sound! That was my most accurate conversion." (MG)
|
| Street_Hawk.sid | | "The game was re-assigned in early 1986 to Comic Bakery's programmer
Colin Gresty and artist Steve Wahid, and they enthusiastically got
to work on it, coming up with an all-new approach with nicer
graphics - more like the early Grand Theft Auto games (top-down viewed
from a chase camera). However it was very slow going for those guys
and while the art/design was done by mid-1987, Colin was still
finishing the programming towards the end of that year, say, about
September. Ocean, who'd been advertising the game in magazines for
months, were very annoyed by this delay and were not going to make
their intended profit. (Perhaps their option window to publish the
game was expiring too, who knows?) So they cancelled the project when
it was at the 99%-complete stage and fired Colin." (MG)
|
| Street_Hawk_Prototype.sid | | "Of course I have recollections... where do I begin... are you
sitting comfortably? The fact that there are two versions of
Streethawk music is part of the whole mystery of Streethawk, really.
It started in 1985 and was programmed by Mike Webb, who'd just come
off Amstrad Kong Strikes Back. Lateral thinker that he is, he had a
rather unique design going (a sideways scrolling platform-jumping
design which is probably now lost forever), and I think he went on
holiday for a week or two, and when he came back they decided to have
him do another project - or, he left to join forces with Richard Kay
at Software Creations. (He definitely did the latter, but I can't
remember the timeline exactly.)" (MG)
|
| Swag.sid | | |
| Terra_Cresta.sid | | "I tried to create this feeling of a massive behemoth robot monster on
its way to destroy you. Thus the marching beat and the minor chords
and stark tones. I had to stick in the inevitable jamming solo towards
the end of course. I was starting to face the glass ceiling imposed by
the filter on the C64. While my particular SID sounded great, others
were not like it at all and the solos were almost inaudible! At the
other extreme the new C64C's were coming out and this filter
unreliability had been fixed as part of a silicon revision. BUT the
filters were way too open all the time and you could hardly hear any
filtering! This caused the filtered note to come out a lot louder than
it should have and 'stick out' rather unattractively. So I developed a
'filter adjustment' parameter for my music program which would allow
the customer to control this filter unreliability and get their
particular machine to sound cool. But David Collier never put it in
the options screen. (DOH!) There's always something wrong, eh?" (MG)
|
| Times_of_Lore.sid | | "I remember I squeezed the code & data for 25 sound-effects into 923
bytes - not bad, eh?" (MG)
|
| Wizball.sid | | The opening bars of this tune are sampled by the group Console on
their song "14 Zero Zero".
|
| Yie_Ar_Kung_Fu.sid | | All except tune #19 are covers of the arcade version.
|
| Yie_Ar_Kung_Fu_II.sid | | "I just tried to come up with a crazy way of settling on a beginning
note (my favourite beginning note of course, G - almost everything I
do is in G). So I plugged in this echoing waveform thing and let it
rip. The tune isn't particularly Chinese sounding, but I was working
on producing that 'perfect melody', the one you'd be humming all day,
you know. That was a phase I went through. [...] The sound I was
converting from was itself a conversion of the arcade cabinet, which I
have NEVER SEEN. It sounded like it was a lame conversion too, so I
easily did a better sounding version. (The MSX's music only used two
notes at once, for example.)" (MG)
|