SID - The Rock 'n Roll Years

They don't make legends like they used to. Game music, like pop, is now a disposable commodity. Necessarily formulaic, compromised by accountants, evaluated by clueless executives, and ripped apart by demographics.

Yet a band of pioneers once changed game music forever: from tinkly infant-jingles to mature soundtracks. Game music, briefly, was the new Rock 'n Roll. Fans bought games for their music. Terrible games sold for their soundtrack. These musicians had fun. They made the rules. They were interviewed as gods. Then like most Rock gods, they were quietly forgotten.

Rock 'n Roll's growth was made possible by the electric guitar: a sound instantly recognisable and anarchic. The electric guitar of the time was the Commodore 64 Sound chip (MOS6581 Sound Interface Device, or SID). Its eccentric engineering and obscure features were out of place in a machine intended for business. This was, ironically, a by-product of corporate thinking:

This was hardware that could justifiably be called an instrument, and which began to attract attention from the technical music press. More importantly, it began to attract musicians. They came for the hardware, but they stayed for the opportunity to tap a new infant art form.

The earliest convert was Fred Gray, originally hired as Imagine's in-house music man, and master of the bouncy tune. His bouncy melodies and later the happy soundtracks of David Dunn were rare examples of game music being treated as more than an afterthought, though serious electronic pieces such as Fred's later work were still some way off.

That all changed in 1985, when game music discovered its twin deities: Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway.

Martin had been established at Ocean since 1984, but Rob's entry into the scene reinforced Martin's conviction that game music was an art form:

Rob's entry into computer music was as driven by the same conviction that computer music was ripe for revolution:

Rob underplays the impact he had. He changed the rules. Thing on a Spring (for which he was apparently only paid £25!) and Monty on the Run (first computer violin and guitar solos) were so well received that he imbued the job of freelance musician with the sort of acclaim real Rock 'n Rollers become addicted to.

If Rob was the groundbreaking Elvis of the scene, then Buddy Holly was Martin Galway: his music was more studious, introverted and technical: though his sales technique was surprisingly sophisticated:

Where Rob's music was busy, Martin's was measured, trancey and abstract. When Hypersports, and later Rambo appeared, he was elevated to Rock God along with Rob. The adulation soon spread…

The 8-bit era is primarily remembered as a fun place to be. Of course, there were occupational hazards:

However, despite the cowboy nature of the time, the big names seemed to be well-treated: they were well-known and even budget games companies recognised that a game was naked without a soundtrack from one of them.

However, if you weren't a big-name composer, things were less rosy:

If there are more lurid stories from the time, they weren't revealed to this interviewer, though one can only guess at the Rock 'n Roll memories hidden in an alcoholic haze:

To natural performers like Ben Daglish, freelance game musician was a way of life. Not content with selling music, he also produced demos with long-time friend Tony Crowther for distribution on the legendary C64-only BBS Compunet. It was Ben who was responsible for one of the most humorous piss-takes of the time: the Chicken Song story.

The extensive Zzap!64 magazine coverage played a very large part in creating the legends, and attracted wannabes to the composers. Rob Hubbard later bitterly regretted putting his phone number into a promotional demo that later found its way to Compunet.

One of the most persistent of these was Barry Leitch, who started off his music career with some truly awe-inspiringly dreadful versions of the Chicken Song and the Eastenders theme. The story would have ended there if he hadn't been continually phoning up the composers to bother them. When Ben Daglish heard the Chicken Song, he swung into action and cajoled Rob Hubbard and Dave Whittaker to produce piss-takes of Barry's chicken song version. Rob even threw in the Eastenders theme and The Power of Love too, each worse than the last. Ben and Tony even came up with alternative lyrics. Musical jokes have a fine tradition, but this one was surprisingly public!

But it wasn't just the musicians who had fun. The 8-bit world was full of jokers: and unlike today's Easter Eggs in programs, the jokes were often surprisingly high profile:

But some pranks never change…

And as for the rumour of the highly paid programmer who spent most of the day looking in to peoples apartments with his binoculars and blatantly looking for women undressing, well, that remains a rumour!

In the halcyon days of 1986, games could be very quick to produce, and could mostly be done by one or two people. That went double for the music. These quickdraw musicians were legendary for their ability to turn jobs round in timescales that would barely cover one product meeting today. In these circles, time had a different meaning.

But the King of the quick knock-off was David Whittaker:

Even the perfectionists could pull it out of the bag when the need arose:

And in the right mood, some notoriously pedantic composers could pull it out of the bag on occasions:

Some composers were more resourceful in beating composer's block:

Though game music did not pay Drug Baron wages, it was a good living:

It had also been an escape from the many worse ways to earn a living at the time:

But underlying it all was the same insecurity behind all the great Rock 'n roll stars: that it would all end as quickly as it had begun.

Just as Elvis was too talented for some of the crap they made him sing, so the composers often found themselves writing music for games which left something to be desired:

One of the defining features of the era is that the music became a very definite selling point of the games. This can be traced primarily to the huge influence of Zzap!64, and especially to reviewers Gary Liddon, Gary Penn and Julian Rignall, who made a special point of providing music critiques for each product, and in naming, shaming, praising and interviewing individual composers: a house style continued by subsequent reviewers.

It was a common occurrence, but pragmatism eased the pain:

Thanks to the licensing explosion of the mid-80s, the composers spent a surprising amount of time creating music for arcade licence conversions. Much of the time, they had to do it without seeing the actual arcade cabinet, which taxed the ingenuity of programmers and musicians alike…

And when they did have the cabinet, the problems weren't over:

Mark's solution to the problem was simple: produce original music and ditch the original soundtrack! Paperboy and Ghosts 'n Goblins both featured tunes which were unique to the C64 version of the game:

However some musicians felt the need to improve on the original:

Like Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Brian Eno or Phillip Glass, the major figures from that time had more impact than they realised when their ideas fell upon naive but imaginative teenage ears. The second wave of musicians from '88 onwards, such as Jeroen Tel did not name legendary musicians first as their inspiration: they named the C64 composers they idolised.

The end of the 8-bit rock 'n roll years was painful for some, but for others it was a welcome chance to do something more adult:

And one musician in particular is even better remembered for his 16-bit exploits with Sensible Software than his 8-bit canon:

Now there is a retro music scene to carry a torch that by commercial reality should have been extinguished long ago:

And for a last observation, over to the King himself: