In October 1985 ZZAP!64 reviewed a platform game and wrote mostly about its music. “It’s almost worth buying for the music alone!” one reviewer said of Gremlin Graphics’ Monty on the Run, and the magazine gave the composer, Rob Hubbard, a feature of his own. The next spring its readers voted the Monty tune the best music of 1985, with 27% of the vote. Players were following composers by name, and listening to the music as well as playing the games.
The music they followed was chip music, written for the sound chip inside the machine. Twenty years later it had become a scene of its own. Fans had collected every Commodore 64 tune they could find into one archive, bought CDs of remixes and gathered in a London church to hear the old composers play, and in 2005 an American games magazine reported on musicians playing live shows on Game Boys, “from New York to Norway”.
The chips
Each machine gave its composers a different instrument, and each had tight limits.
- The Commodore 64’s SID is a synthesiser on a chip: three voices, four waveforms, an envelope for each voice and a resonant filter.
- The AY-3-8910 and its relatives, in the Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Atari ST, have three square-wave channels, a noise source and a single envelope generator.
- The 48K ZX Spectrum has only a speaker that is either on or off. Tim Follin’s routine, printed in Your Sinclair in 1987, still made it play three parts at once.
- The NES’s APU has two pulse channels, a triangle, a noise generator and a channel for delta-modulated samples.
- The Game Boy has four sound circuits, which Nintendo’s programming manual lists as two square-wave (“quadrangular”) channels, one for any waveform the program stores, and a noise generator.
- The Amiga’s Paula works differently: its four channels play 8-bit recorded samples from memory, so any sound can become an instrument.
Making three voices sound like more
Composers worked around the limits with a few tricks. An arpeggio cycles one voice through the notes of a chord so fast that the ear hears the chord. Martin Galway later said, “I believe I invented the fast arpeggiation technique for mimicking chords, first released in Kong Strikes Back in 1984”, though other composers used the idea as well. Changing a note while it played gave slides and vibrato.
Samples were harder. The SID has no sample channel, but a program that writes values to its volume register thousands of times a second can play crude drum sounds, at a large cost in processor time. Galway’s Arkanoid (1987) did it in a commercial game before most listeners knew it was possible, and Chris Hülsbeck had built his own sampled-drum player at Rainbow Arts. The Dutch pair Maniacs of Noise, Jeroen Tel and Charles Deenen, made samples part of their sound. Tel’s favourite piece of his own, Out Run Europa, was a lesson in economy: “I only had two channels to work with, but I managed to make it sound like it was four.”
The composers talked about the chips as instruments. At ZZAP!64’s round-table in 1986, Ben Daglish called the question of whether the SID had been stretched to its limits “nonsensical”: nobody asked that about the flute, and the SID was “something that you can play music on”.
Demos and trackers
The music also lived outside the games. In the Commodore 64 demo scene a crew usually had a musician, and Commodore Disk User noted in 1987 that “many demos feature musical pieces hacked out of the latest software”. The most admired demo it described, Thrust Concert, animated a band playing along to a Rob Hubbard tune.
On the Amiga, SoundTracker and ProTracker made music from samples, and the modules they saved spread through public domain libraries and archives such as Aminet. Some musicians made very small modules instead, built from short synthesised waveforms in place of recorded instruments. In 1993 Amiga Computing described synthesised sounds made on the Amiga’s sound chip as “what we call ‘chip music’”. By the mid-1990s “chiptune” was the name for these small modules: in December 1995 Amiga Shopper reviewed a disk of 40K intros with “10 small chiptunes”, and in 1996 the Italian Amiga Magazine found a CD-ROM that sorted its modules by size, with 512 normal modules, 21 large ones and 115 chiptunes.
Collecting and remixing
By the late 1990s the Commodore 64 music had its own preservation project. The High Voltage SID Collection (HVSC) began in May 1996, when a scener known as The Shark set out to merge the SID collections on the internet, which were full of “bugged SIDs, repeats, and inaccurate credits”, into one. The team began ripping the missing tunes from old software and tracked down composers to settle who wrote what, Peter Sandén of HVSC told Retro Gamer in 2004. The project aimed to hold “every single piece of music ever created for the SID chip”. In 2002 ZZAP!64’s revival issue counted “well over 10,000 SID tunes” in it. Listeners played the files on their PCs with programs such as SIDPlay. A Californian DJ who played SID music on the radio told GO64! in 2000 that his show “wouldn’t be possible without the High Voltage SID Collection”.
Remixes followed. In September 1998 Edge reported that Chris Abbott had spent “two man years” on Back in Time, a CD of just over 70 minutes of remixed Commodore 64 music, from Hubbard’s Sanxion and Delta to Galway’s Wizball and Hülsbeck’s Great Giana Sisters, sold at £12.99. Abbott then took the music on stage. At his C64 club night in Birmingham, reported by Edge in 2001, a crowd trapped Rob Hubbard in a corner with questions about Monty on the Run. “I live in the States,” he said, and he had “absolutely no idea about what’s going on with the whole thing”. Still, he said, “It represents a unique time in history.” At Back in Time Live in 2004, at St Luke’s, a former church in London, Ben Daglish was master of ceremonies and played flute with the band Press Play on Tape.
The Game Boy on stage
The next wave used the old hardware itself. In Germany Oliver Wittchow wrote Nanoloop, a sequencer and synthesiser on a Game Boy cartridge; Lotek64 called it intuitive, “kinderleicht” (child’s play), in 2003. Little Sound DJ was the other Game Boy program musicians named. In February 2005 Electronic Gaming Monthly described musicians “hotwiring their handhelds to create homebrewed 8-bit bop”, and playing concerts that drew “hundreds of retro hipsters”. Jason DeGroot, who performed as 6955 in Tokyo, had played live on a customised Game Boy since 1999. Jeremiah Johnson, known as Nullsleep, had co-founded 8bitpeoples, a New York collective that gave its releases away on its website, and EGM called micromusic.net “the European hub for chip tunes scene”. Johnson did not expect to move on to the new Nintendo DS: it was “mostly sample-based and has a lot more audio channels to work with, so it’s not as interesting of a music-creation platform.”
By the end of 2005 Edge could mention “myriad other chiptune cover bands” in passing, while reporting that FamiComBand, a band that played Famicom tunes, was back on tour. According to public reference works, 8bitpeoples organised the Blip Festival in New York from 2006, which toured to Denmark, Tokyo and Melbourne before its last event, in Tokyo, in 2012.
Sources
- ZZAP!64 issue 6, October 1985, pp. 16–17: Monty on the Run review and Julian Rignall’s piece on Rob Hubbard.
- ZZAP!64 issue 12, April 1986: readers’ awards for 1985, best music.
- ZZAP!64 issue 16, August 1986, pp. 39–42: “The Musicians’ Ball”, round-table with Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Tony Crowther and David Whittaker.
- Your Sinclair, August 1987: Tim Follin’s three-channel sound routine (see the Vault’s Tim Follin entry).
- Nintendo of America, Game Boy Programming Manual version 1.1, 1999, p. 19: the four sound circuits.
- For the SID, AY-3-8910, APU and Paula, the Vault’s hardware entries and the manufacturers’ documents they cite.
- Retro Gamer: The Commodore 64 Book (2012), “The SID Crowd”, pp. 24–29: Martin Galway on arpeggios and on sample playback.
- Commodore Force issue 2, February 1993: interview with Jeroen Tel (Out Run Europa).
- Retro Gamer issue 115, June 2013, pp. 92–93: interview with Chris Hülsbeck (his sampled-drum player and Arkanoid).
- David Bain, “Compunet Culture”, Commodore Disk User vol. 1 no. 1, November 1987, pp. 36–37: musicians in demo crews, Thrust Concert.
- Amiga Computing issue 57, February 1993: music feature (“what we call ‘chip music’”).
- Amiga Shopper issue 56, December 1995: public domain reviews, a disk of 40K intros with “10 small chiptunes”.
- Amiga Magazine (Italy) no. 78, May 1996: CD-ROM review, modules sorted by size, 115 chiptunes (in Italian).
- Edge issue 62, September 1998: news, “The sound of SID-ness”, Chris Abbott’s Back in Time.
- GO64!, June 2000: interview with a Californian radio DJ who played SID music (HVSC and SIDPlay).
- Edge issue 100, August 2001: report on the C64 club night, with Rob Hubbard.
- ZZAP!64 issue 107, March 2002: the High Voltage SID Collection, “well over 10,000 SID tunes”.
- Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004: feature on C64 music and interview with Peter Sandén of the HVSC.
- Retro Gamer issue 9, 2004: report on Back in Time Live at St Luke’s.
- Lotek64 issue 8, December 2003: Nanoloop and Oliver Wittchow (in German).
- David Kushner, “Game Boy music”, Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 188, February 2005, p. 52: Nanoloop, Little Sound DJ, 6955, Nullsleep and 8bitpeoples, micromusic.net.
- Edge issue 156, December 2005: news, FamiComBand.
- Wikipedia, “Blip Festival” (web, secondary): dates, organisers and locations, 2006–2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blip_Festival