In December 1990 the French ST Magazine asked Jochen Hippel, known on the scene as Mad Max, how it felt to hear most of the Atari ST’s demo groups using his music, when perhaps they should not. “It doesn’t bother me!” he said. And the groups that had built little music editors on top of his routines? “On the ST?!” he laughed. “I wasn’t aware!” (quotations translated). Two and a half years later, the same magazine explained why so many games crashed on Atari’s new Falcon, in a section headed “Mad Max est coupable!” (Mad Max is guilty!). The writer had fought with his routines to make them work, “and since everyone uses routines more or less derived from his …”. Hippel’s music had become part of the machinery of ST software.
Fast facts
- Name: Jochen Hippel; scene name Mad Max.
- Group: The Exceptions (TEX), one of the first demo groups on the Atari ST.
- First game: Bad Cat (Rainbow Arts), an arrangement rather than an original score, by his own account.
- Game work: for Rainbow Arts, Hewson, Thalion, Starbyte, Grandslam and others; music for Thalion’s Wings of Death and Lethal Xcess, and the Amiga conversion of A Prehistoric Tale.
- Tools: his own music software and replay routines; Amiga players later supported “Hippel” and “Hippel-COSO” as music formats.
From the C64 to The Exceptions
Hippel started on the Commodore 64. Michael Raasch, the TEX coder known as Daryl, told ST Magazine in 1991 that he had known Jochen “since the C64 days”. When Daryl invited Erik Simon and Udo Fischer, two of the group’s founders, to a party at his home, “they saw that Jochen was making music and asked him to join, which he did”. Fischer said that the soundtrack of his BIG Demo was Hippel’s job: “it was Jochen who had to convert all the C64 music.”
Doing that meant getting Commodore 64 tunes out of a very different chip. The ST’s sound came from a Yamaha YM2149, a version of General Instrument’s AY-3-8910 with three square-wave voices and a noise generator, and it had none of the SID’s filters or waveforms. Hippel wrote his own tools to do it. When the Italian magazine K visited Thalion in 1990, it called the 18-year-old “an incredible music programmer” who recreated the music and effects of C64 and Amiga games and demos “just for fun”. It watched him redo a classic Rob Hubbard tune in a few minutes with a sound editor he had written himself, typing in the hexadecimal at a speed the reporter found as impressive as the tune (translated).
Music for games
By the time ST Magazine interviewed him for its November 1991 feature on TEX, with Daryl asking the questions, Hippel was 20 and composing full-time, “if you can call that work, because for me it’s a pleasure”. He had no qualifications: “as soon as I finished school I started making music on computers.” His first game had been Rainbow Arts’ Bad Cat, “an adaptation, not a composition”; since then he had done “an enormous amount” for Rainbow Arts, Thalion, Hewson, Starbyte, Grandslam and others, and he was working on Thalion’s shooting game Lethal Xcess and its next role-playing game. Demo music was easier to write, he said, because it only needed “a good theme” to go round for hours; game music had to create an atmosphere. One demo tune had taken him two hours, another nearly eight. He wrote all his own software apart from his sampler, which Michael Bittner had designed and he had improved, and he worked surrounded by a Roland D-20, a piano, two STs, two Amigas and a Commodore 64 (translated).
Databases of ST software credit him with music for Hewson’s Astaroth and Cybernoid II, Thalion’s Chambers of Shaolin, Dragonflight and Amberstar, and many more. Chris Wilkins’s history of Amiga games picks out “the stunning visuals and sublime soundtrack by Jochen ‘Mad Max’ Hippel” in Thalion’s shoot-’em-up Wings of Death (1990). The One introduced him in 1992 simply as “Thalion musician Jochen Hippel”, reviewing a public-domain disk of his tunes; it found the music “a bit on the bland side”.
He worked on the Amiga too. The Amiga version of A Prehistoric Tale, a game by the ST group The Lost Boys, carries a message inside it: “AMIGA-CONVERSION BY JOCHEN HIPPEL HALLO LEUTE !!!!!” (“hello everyone”). His work crossed paths with Chris Huelsbeck’s. “Jochen Hippel translated some of my tunes to his own Atari ST sound system, which was really efficient and emulated the Amiga sound chip,” Huelsbeck recalled. For Turrican II he ported Hippel’s code back to the Amiga, mixing four simulated voices into one channel, “and with Jochen’s help” ended up with seven voices on a four-channel machine.
Everyone’s routines
Hippel’s tunes and routines spread far beyond his own releases. In August 1992 ST Magazine reported a single demo screen holding 257 Mad Max tunes, eight and a half hours of music that ran on a 520 ST. Public-domain libraries sold disks of his “sound chip music”. Amiga music players supported his formats: the EaglePlayer module player listed “Hippel” and “Hippel-COSO” among the formats it supported, alongside players named after Rob Hubbard and David Whittaker.
That reach had a cost when Atari launched the Falcon 030 in 1993. ST Magazine’s guide to why old games would not run on it blamed, among other things, the 68030 processor’s caches, which can disagree with memory when a program modifies its own code, a “technique used to excess in demos and games”. The writer said he bore Hippel no personal grudge: “It’s just that I fought with his routines to make them run on the Falcon. And since everyone uses routines more or less derived from his …” (translated).
Sources
- ST Magazine (France) issue 49, February 1991, pp. 64–66: interview with TEX, recorded on 23 December 1990 (Mad Max on demo groups using his music, editors based on his routines, his routines evolving, his favourite musicians: “Musicien !”).
- ST Magazine (France) issue 56, November 1991, pp. 68–70: “Demos: Schpetzial TEX” (Udo Fischer on the BIG Demo’s C64 music; Daryl on how Jochen joined; Daryl’s interview with Mad Max: age, schooling, Bad Cat, his clients, Lethal Xcess, demo and game music, his software and equipment). Quotations translated.
- K (Italy) issue 15, March 1990: Thalion feature (the team photograph, “Jochen Hippel (18)”; the Rob Hubbard tune and his own sound editor). Quotations translated.
- The One issue 40, January 1992, p. 91: public-domain review, a disk of tunes “by Thalion musician Jochen Hippel”.
- ST Magazine (France) issue 64, August 1992: demo news (MCoder’s screen of 257 Mad Max tunes).
- Atari ST User issue 86, April 1993: public-domain library listing (“Mad Max Chip Music: 35 pieces of sound chip music”).
- ST Magazine (France) issue 72, May 1993: “Falcon & jeux” (“Mad Max est coupable !”; the 68030 caches and self-modifying code). Quotations translated.
- Bajtek (Poland) issue 12, 1995: Amiga module players, table 5, formats recognised by EaglePlayer 1.54 (“Hippel”, “Hippel-COSO”, “Rob Hubbard”, “Whittaker”).
- A Prehistoric Tale (Thalion, Amiga, 1990–91): text inside the game, “AMIGA-CONVERSION BY JOCHEN HIPPEL HALLO LEUTE !!!!!”.
- Retro Gamer issue 115, June 2013, pp. 90–94: “In the Chair: Chris Huelsbeck” (Hippel’s ST sound system and the Turrican II seven-voice system).
- Chris Wilkins, The Story of the Amiga in Pixels, pp. 146–147: Wings of Death (Thalion/Eclipse, 1990), soundtrack by Jochen “Mad Max” Hippel.
- Atarimania, Jochen Hippel’s game list (database, secondary): Bad Cat (Rainbow Arts, 1988), Astaroth and Cybernoid II (Hewson, 1989), Chambers of Shaolin (1989), Dragonflight (1990), Amberstar (1992) and others. https://www.atarimania.com/pgelstsoft.awp?system=S&type=G&team=2514&step=25
- Codetapper, “A Prehistoric Tale: Amiga Soundtrack Battle” (web, secondary): The Lost Boys’ game, published by Thalion; Hippel’s Amiga conversion; the title tune in his COSO format. https://codetapper.com/amiga/random-rants/a-prehistoric-tale-amiga-soundtrack-battle/
- German Wikipedia, “Jochen Hippel” (web, secondary): born 14 October 1971. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jochen_Hippel