Ben Daglish was 19 when ZZAP!64 sat him in a room with Rob Hubbard, Tony Crowther and David Whittaker in the summer of 1986, and he already had a dozen game soundtracks behind him. He did not claim to be anything grand. “I never pretend to be a composer,” he told the magazine, “I’m a tunesmith.” A year later he was writing the themes for System 3’s The Last Ninja, and ZZAP!64’s readers were voting its title tune into their chart of favourite game music.
Fast facts
- Born: 1966; grew up in Sheffield.
- W.E.M.U.S.I.C.: a music company with the programmer Tony Crowther, run from home, by 1986.
- Gremlin Graphics: in-house composer from early 1987.
- Best-known work: the six main themes of The Last Ninja (1987); Trap (1986); Auf Wiedersehen Monty (1987), with Rob Hubbard.
- Later: left the games industry in the early 1990s; performed at retro-gaming concerts.
- Died: 1 October 2018, aged 52.
A folk club, a university and a school software company
The Games Machine profiled him in October 1987. His parents were musicians who ran a folk club, and he had played orchestral percussion for years. He meant to study music seriously but took maths and physics instead, went to university, and within a year decided it was not for him and went home to Sheffield.
Like Hubbard, he started with educational software. In the ZZAP!64 round-table he described Aztec Software, a company writing programs for schools on the BBC Micro, before his first game music: Loco, for Alligata, written “in two voices”. Loco was Tony Crowther’s game, and back in Sheffield Daglish renewed the partnership. The two ran a music company from Daglish’s home, W.E.M.U.S.I.C., which ZZAP!64 printed as “We MUSIC” and which later accounts expand as “We Make Use of Sound In Computers”. Both wrote music for other publishers’ games: in the round-table Crowther claimed Suicide Express and Daglish Black Thunder.
By September 1986 his credits included Black Thunder (Quicksilva), A View to a Kill (Domark), William Wobbler (Wizard), Ark Pandora and Bombo (Rino), Biggles (Mirrorsoft), Trap and Pub Games (Alligata), and The Way of the Tiger, Pentacle and Future Knight for Gremlin Graphics. His own favourites were Trap and the second-screen tune in Bombo.
The musicians’ round-table
ZZAP!64’s August 1986 round-table was loud and mostly a joke, but Daglish used it to make two points. The first was his name: “It’s D-A-G, not D-A-L-G-L-I-S-H”, he spelled out for the magazine. The second was the SID chip. Asked whether the chip had been stretched to its limits, he answered that nobody would ask whether the flute, around for some 2,000 years, had been stretched to its limits. The SID was not a machine but an instrument, “something that you can play music on”, and the question was “nonsensical”. Hubbard agreed. Daglish also asked readers to return a set of stolen disks, which held all his development work and Crowther’s source code, “no questions asked”.
Gremlin Graphics
Early in 1987 Crowther moved to Ariolasoft, and Daglish joined Gremlin Graphics in Sheffield. Computer Gamer wondered what this meant for “the dynamic duo’s fruitful partnership”, since Daglish now needed Gremlin’s permission for outside work. The Games Machine reported that the business side of W.E.M.U.S.I.C. had “detracted from music making”, and that he was “more than pleased” when Gremlin offered him a job.
In March 1987 Computer Gamer found him working in Sheffield with Rob Hubbard on a project for Gremlin. For that year’s Monty Mole game, Auf Wiedersehen Monty, Commodore Computing International called its music Daglish’s and ranked it among the best of the year, and later accounts credit the score to both men. That summer Gremlin also sponsored “Computer Power”, a music presentation organised by Commodore Computing International for a computer show, with Daglish among its stars.
The Games Machine found him in a workroom with synthesisers, an Atari ST, a Commodore 64 and sheets of manuscript paper on the walls. He worked tunes out on the keyboard first, then entered them through a player program written by Gremlin’s programmers, not by him. The ST acted as a master controller, and the same data could be recoded for the Amstrad, BBC Micro, Atari and Spectrum 128. The player let him repeat sections as often as he liked, “so it’s possible to get quite lengthy, interesting tunes out of a small core of material”. His complaint was the speaker: whatever he wrote on big stereo speakers would be heard through the “horrible speakers on the monitor or on-board the micro”.
The Last Ninja
For The Last Ninja (1987) ZZAP!64 described 12 pieces of music in June 1987: six intermission tracks by Anthony Lees that play while each section loads, and six main themes by Daglish. Later accounts credit Lees with at least one of the in-game themes, the Palace Gardens. The title tune went into ZZAP!64‘s readers’ music chart that autumn, fourth in October 1987 and third in January 1988, behind two Rob Hubbard pieces.
After games
Daglish worked in games until about 1992, and he did not miss the change that followed. “Now, it’s just like any other industry - which is why I left,” he told the Australian magazine Hyper in 2002. “When there were only 5 of us in the country doing the job, it was much more ‘here’s a piece of Hubbard’ or ‘here’s a Daglish track’.” At a retro evening reported by Edge in 2001, he remembered the end at Gremlin: “The day I left Gremlin was the day a salesman started wandering around talking about shipping products.”
The old tunes kept him on stage. At Back in Time Live, a concert of Commodore 64 music at St Luke’s in London in 2004, he was master of ceremonies and joined the band Press Play on Tape on flute for Monty on the Run. He lived in Derbyshire, where he played in local bands, and he performed with the violinist Mark Knight at retro-gaming events.
He died suddenly on 1 October 2018, aged 52.
Sources
- ZZAP!64 issue 16, August 1986, pp. 39–42: “The Musicians’ Ball”, round-table with Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Tony Crowther (“better known as We MUSIC”) and David Whittaker (Aztec Software, Loco, the tunesmith remark, the SID and the flute, the stolen disks).
- ZZAP! (Italian edition) issue 4, September 1986, p. 67: translated profiles (age 19, Sheffield, list of credits and favourites).
- Computer Gamer issue 24, March 1987: Daglish joins Gremlin; working with Rob Hubbard in Sheffield. Issue 25, April 1987: “Ben Daglish is making music with Gremlin”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986: Loco, “inspired by an arcade game Tony Crowther once saw in Spain”.
- Commodore Computing International, August 1987 (“Computer Power”; Auf Wiedersehen Monty) and September 1987 (the Auf Wiedersehen Monty soundtrack).
- The Games Machine issue 1, October 1987, pp. 113–114: profile of Daglish as Gremlin’s in-house music writer (family, university, W.E.M.U.S.I.C., working methods).
- ZZAP!64 issue 26, June 1987, pp. 51–52: The Last Ninja music by Anthony Lees and Ben Daglish. Issue 30, October 1987, p. 120, and issue 33, January 1988: readers’ music chart.
- Retro Gamer issue 18, 2005: Palace Gardens credited to Anthony Lees; the Wastelands theme to Daglish.
- Edge issue 62, September 1998: Back in Time CD track list (Auf Wiedersehen Monty, Daglish/Hubbard).
- Edge issue 100, August 2001: retro evening report (Daglish on leaving Gremlin).
- Hyper issue 107, September 2002: interview (in games 1982–92; why he left).
- Retro Gamer issue 9, 2004: Back in Time Live report (St Luke’s; MC; flute with Press Play on Tape).
- Wikipedia, “Ben Daglish” (web, secondary): the expansion of W.E.M.U.S.I.C.; Derbyshire, local bands and Mark Knight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Daglish
- Chris Kerr, “Obituary: Legendary video game composer Ben Daglish”, Game Developer, 4 October 2018 (web, secondary): his death. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/obituary-legendary-video-game-composer-ben-daglish