On 25 August 1988 a cassette reached Raffaele Cecco in an envelope far too big for it. It held the first demo of the music for Cybernoid II, and Cecco wrote in his CRASH diary that he was impressed: the melody was “quite different from the original Cybernoid”, yet it still sounded like the same game. “Great stuff. My only problem now is to find the memory to put this lot in! (By the way Dave, why the A4-sized jiffy bag for just one cassette tape?)” That was how Rogers worked: a freelance composer who wrote at home, sent his music through the post, and rarely met the programmers whose games it played in. When CRASH started a readers’ music chart in February 1989, two of the ten places went to his tunes for Cybernoid and Cybernoid II.
Fast facts
- Hewson work: music and effects for Cecco’s Cybernoid (1988), Cybernoid II (1988), Stormlord (1989) and Deliverance: Stormlord II (1990); sound for Nebulus and Netherworld; the Amstrad conversion of Uridium’s music and a fuller Amstrad arrangement for Ranarama; original music for Zynaps.
- Machines: his sound drivers played on the 48K and 128K Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC and the Atari ST.
- Tools: an Amstrad CPC 464, a guitar and a note editor he wrote himself in Amstrad BASIC.
From ZX81 to Hewson
In May 1989 Amstrad Action asked Rogers to explain how game music was made, and he began with his own route into it. “I first started computing on (all together now…) a ZX81. I then wrote some magazine articles, did a brief bit on Dragon and Spectrum, and went on to write commercial Amstrad games, including Radzone and Biospheres, after which I turned to music.” Retro Gamer later added two ZX81 games to that list, Flatman and Money Grabber.
He told Amstrad Action that he did three kinds of work. The first was conversion: turning, say, a Commodore 64 soundtrack into an Amstrad one, as for Uridium, where “a vari-speed tape recorder comes in very handy for slowing down the original”. The second was upgrading, as on Ranarama, “where the original Amstrad tune was just a melody line, and my job was to add basslines, harmonies and other bits and pieces”. The third, “and most often”, was writing his own music and effects from scratch, “as in Zynaps, Cybernoid etc.” Nearly all of it went to one publisher. “Although freelance, most of my sound work has been for Hewson, and it is nice to be associated with such a high quality product.”
Cybernoid, Cybernoid II and Stormlord
Hewson brought Rogers in to score Cybernoid. He worked from videotapes of the game, Retro Gamer reported, and posted back the drivers and the music. He wanted “a sort of relentless or non-stop charging ahead feel”, and to get it he filled one of the three channels with notes that were “relentlessly unvarying in their timing but randomised in pitch, though still on musical intervals”, so that the tune came out slightly different every time. CRASH’s reviewers in April 1988 singled out “an amazing 128K in-game tune”; the music played on the Spectrum 128’s AY-3-8912 sound chip, which generates its three tones in hardware instead of making the processor toggle a speaker. Rogers’s music was used on the Spectrum and Atari ST versions, while the Commodore 64 version got a new theme from Jeroen Tel. Years later Rogers regretted one thing: the tune played through the whole game, and he wished Cecco had offered a way to turn it off and keep only the sound effects, “which he did in Cybernoid II”.
Cecco’s diary in CRASH tracks the sequel’s music. On 1 August 1988 all that was left to do was to incorporate “the new music soundtrack by Dave Rogers (who also put together the original Cybernoid tune)”; the first demo arrived on the 25th. Rogers rated the game highly. Its “amazing, everything-happening-at-once, near-chaos”, he wrote in Amstrad Action, pushed his sound system “to its limit. In fact I’m surprised it doesn’t get tied up in knots. (This game, by the way, gets my vote as best ever, and is the sort of game I would love to have written myself.)”
Stormlord followed. In an entry dated 11 November 1988 Cecco recorded that “sound effects and music for Stormlord from Dave Rogers” had come through the post: “I hastily incorporate them into the program to have a listen. The sound effects are splendid, but the main tune still needs working on.” Rogers stayed with Cecco for the sequel: when Your Sinclair previewed Deliverance: Stormlord II in April 1990, its credit box read “Graphics and code, Rafaelle Cecco. Music, Dave Rogers.”
How the music worked
Rogers composed away from the computer at first, but not on his best instrument. He owned a Korg DW8000 synthesiser and found it “rather misleading for composing”, because it made “any old handfuls of notes sound quite impressive”. Played on the Amstrad’s AY chip, the same notes came out “sounding pretty feeble”, so he composed “on the Amstrad itself, on a guitar, or on my little-old-mono-phonic-Casiotone (if it sounds good on that, it can only get better on the Amstrad!)”. He typed the notes and durations into an editor he had written in Amstrad BASIC, and his own compiler packed them into a block of data. Only the driver that played it was in machine code. “Everything else was written in BASIC, which, as we all know, is a language that is never, ever used by proper games programmers! But I preferred it,” he told Retro Gamer. The same Amstrad-made data drove his players on the 48K and 128K Spectrum and the Atari ST.
On the Amstrad he usually had between 2K and 4K of memory. The driver took 900 bytes and the pitch table 200. Each channel read pairs of bytes, a note and a duration in fiftieths of a second, and values above 100 were commands: change key, pick a random note, rapidly alternate two pitches so that three channels could suggest “a 6 note chord”. A “conductor block” called the rest of the tune in reusable sections, so that “a bass line may even be recycled elsewhere but shifted up by say an octave-and-a-fifth to form a harmony!” Sound effects shared the channels with the music, and priority markers decided which sound won. “So in Stormlord, for example, ‘pick up fairy’ has a higher priority than ‘player fires,’ but not as high as ‘Game over’ which must be able to override anything.”
He made a point of giving players control. A non-stop in-game tune “can get irritating after hours of continuous gameplay, yet is missed if turned off completely”, so for Hewson’s Netherworld he let the player fade the music to any level without changing the volume of the effects.
Working at a distance
“Most readers would be surprised at how little communication there is between the game programmer and the sound person,” Rogers wrote. “It’s usually a matter of a few phone calls, but in one or two cases I’ve neither seen, spoken to, nor heard of the bloke doing the game, and have worked from a typed list of required sounds, together with a really helpful and informative scenario such as ‘it’s a shoot-em-up’!” Retro Gamer reported that he never met Hewson’s programmers at all, though Andrew Hewson once visited him.
He took his time. “I hear of some programmers dashing things off in a few hours or so, but not me. I take weeks.” He rejected anything obvious or predictable, knowing that publishers mostly wanted something instantly recognisable. “My own style tends to sound a bit odd at first and may take a few listens to get into, but Hewson saw its potential, and the reviewers so far seem to have agreed with him.”
The readers agreed too. CRASH’s first Top 10 Music chart, in February 1989, put Cybernoid II at number 4 and Cybernoid at number 8, both credited to Rogers. Tim Follin’s LED Storm was at number 1 and his Bionic Commando at number 3; David Whittaker’s Amaurote was at number 5.
Sources
- Raffaele Cecco, “Cecco’s Log”, CRASH issue 57, October 1988, pp. 72–73 (entries for 1 and 25 August 1988: the new Cybernoid II soundtrack by Dave Rogers, “who also put together the original Cybernoid tune”; the first demo and the jiffy bag); issue 60, January 1989, p. 39 (entry for 11 November 1988: Stormlord’s music and effects).
- CRASH issue 51, April 1988, p. 13: Cybernoid review (“an amazing 128K in-game tune”).
- CRASH issue 61, February 1989: The Charts, Top 10 Music (Cybernoid II and Cybernoid, Dave Rogers; LED Storm and Bionic Commando, Tim Follin; Amaurote, Dave Whittaker).
- Dave Rogers, “Sound advice”, Amstrad Action issue 44, May 1989, pp. 20–21: his background; conversions, upgrades and original scores; composing and the Korg DW8000; the driver, data format, conductor block and priority markers; Cybernoid 2, Stormlord and Netherworld; working with programmers; “most of my sound work has been for Hewson”.
- Your Sinclair issue 52, April 1990, p. 11: Deliverance preview, credit box (“Music. Dave Rogers”).
- David Crookes, “The Making of Cybernoid”, Retro Gamer issue 102, May 2012: Rogers’s Amstrad 464, guitar and BASIC editor; drivers for the Spectrum 48, Spectrum 128 and Atari ST; the ZX81 games; working from videotapes; never meeting Hewson’s programmers; the randomised channel; the music on the Spectrum and ST versions and Jeroen Tel’s C64 theme; the wish for a music-off option.