Martin Galway wrote the music for Ocean Software’s Commodore 64 games at the height of the company’s success, and hardly anyone knew what he looked like. “I was able to walk around shows without being mobbed, unlike Rob Hubbard,” he said later, “because I had strived to keep my photo out of the mags.” The magazines knew him by his tunes instead. ZZAP!64 sent a reporter to Manchester in 1986 to interview “the man responsible for some of the most remarkable music in arcade games at the moment”, and introduced him as the nephew of the flautist James Galway. His Arkanoid played drum sounds through the SID chip’s volume control before most people knew it could be done, and the Wizball title music is the piece he later named as his favourite of his own.
From the BBC Micro to Ocean
Galway was born in Belfast in January 1966 and moved to Manchester at the age of five. His father was a music teacher who tried him on flute, violin, clarinet and piano; only the piano stuck. At school, in 1982, he found he could make the BBC Micro play tunes by lining up the notes as numbers in DATA statements, and he moved from BASIC to assembly language. At 17 he was writing music and sound effects for BBC programs, for a company run by the publishers of Micro User.
In May 1984, aged 18, he went to Ocean Software to sell a friend’s BBC game and played Ocean’s development manager, David Collier, his music. As Galway tells it, Ocean liked the music but not the BBC’s market, so they lent him a Commodore 64, a cassette deck, assembler software and the Commodore 64 Programmer’s Reference Guide, and told him to “get cracking!” He admitted he did not think much of the C64 at first, because of its operating system, then decided that “the best set-up for games is a lot of RAM and some great chips, and the C64 easily excelled there.”
He did his first jobs for Ocean freelance. The C64 Daley Thompson’s Decathlon (1984) loaded to his version of “Rydeen”, the Yellow Magic Orchestra track that the arcade game Super Locomotive had used; Retro Gamer‘s history of the series quotes the tune being hand-coded “note by note … from memory”. Ocean then took him on staff, officially as a programmer, because, he said, “they weren’t comfortable employing someone solely to do music”. He was put on the C64 conversion of Match Day, but spent so much time on other games’ music that the conversion crawled. His first project on staff was Roland’s Rat Race, in January and February 1985.
Ocean’s composer
Over the next three years Galway scored most of Ocean’s C64 games, and those on its Imagine label, from Konami conversions such as Hypersports, Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Green Beret to licences such as Rambo, Miami Vice, Short Circuit and Highlander. By September 1987 Commodore Computing International counted about 40 games since Daley Thompson’s Decathlon “started him off”. The first had taken him three days; a soundtrack now took about six weeks.
Licensed music could mean licensing trouble. Hypersports (1985) included his version of Vangelis’s Chariots of Fire theme, which he wrote from memory in an afternoon. “I got halfway through it when we realised we should probably tell the boss!” David Collier fetched Jon Woods, Galway played it, and Woods walked out with a “troubles ahead” look, then came back five minutes later to say he had “got the rights”.
Memory was the constant limit. ZZAP!64’s interviewer marvelled that Rambo’s “eight or nine major themes had to fit inside 8K”, and Galway called Athena (1987) the tune that drove him insane, because he “only had 4K in which to fit the code and music”. Commodore Computing International praised his Miami Vice (1986) for condensing a 12-minute track and asked, “If Galway can work wonders with Miami Vice on the 64, imagine what he could do on an Amiga!!”
Most of this was Commodore work. He also wrote music for some Spectrum games: The One noted in 1990 that his Arkanoid tune had first appeared in the Spectrum version of Cobra.
How he wrote it
Galway worked without a music editor or a MIDI link. “I had an all assembly language, no fancy editors, hard-work approach to putting in tune data,” he told Retro Gamer. That let him modify the player code for each tune, but “complex tunes could take a month to complete.” In 1986 he told ZZAP!64 he preferred “working purely within the limitations of the machine itself” to transferring music from a synthesiser that the chip’s voices might not be able to handle.
He used several tricks to make three voices sound like more:
- Arpeggios. One voice cycles through the notes of a chord fast enough to sound like the chord itself. Galway said, “I believe I invented the fast arpeggiation technique for mimicking chords, first released in Kong Strikes Back in 1984.” Other composers used the idea too; see arpeggio.
- Changing a note while it plays. “I tried hard to allow myself to change the properties of a note once it had started. This allowed pitch bending and so forth.” He added pulse-width modulation on the project that became Helikopter Jagd.
- Chorusing and echoes, to thicken a line.
He was wary of the filter. Asked in 1986 whether he used it, he said: “No, the filters are too unreliable. A brilliant result on one machine is no guarantee of satisfactory sound on another.” That was a real property of the 6581, whose filter cutoff varies from chip to chip (see SID). Years later he complained that “the filter could only be clearly applied to one voice”.
Arkanoid and the drums
Arkanoid (1987), released on the Imagine label, earned 96% for sound in ZZAP!64’s April 1987 review, and its drums were something new in a commercial C64 game. The SID has no sample channel. Its master volume is a 4-bit value in the low half of register $D418, and every write to it shifts the chip’s output level, which is heard as a click. A program that writes a stream of values there, thousands of times a second, plays a crude 4-bit sample. The trick costs a lot of processor time.
Galway learned it from someone else’s code. “I figured out how samples were played by hacking into someone else’s code… OK, I admit it… It was a drum synthesizer package called Digidrums,” he said. He had no equipment for editing samples, “so my program synthesized the drums as a series of farts and burps!” Chris Hülsbeck, who had built his own sampled-drum player at Rainbow Arts and was waiting for a game to put it in, heard Arkanoid come out first. He said Galway’s “technique was based on the same principle as ours, only his drums were more synthesised”: Galway “didn’t play samples but tiny loops of memory with different values in them that sounded a bit like samples.” Galway never claimed to have invented the method. By Game Over (1987) he had real drum samples.
He was not sentimental about it. “When sample playback was discovered, the musicality went away to a degree, because sample fidelity was low, but it was an unstoppable technological development and couldn’t be resisted.”
Wizball and Sensible Software
Galway’s best-known partnership was with Sensible Software, whose Parallax (1986) and Wizball (1987) Ocean published. For Wizball he wrote much of the music at Sensible’s office. Jon Hare and Chris Yates played guitar and bass lines, and Galway recreated them on the C64, “making it more massive-sounding than the plain guitar version”. The title music was his own. He said it carried “flavours” of Vangelis’s album China, and its change of character halfway through came from finishing it later, back at Ocean, when he knew he “could never top the first part”. He still called Wizball “probably the audiovisual pinnacle of my C64 days”.
Readers agreed. ZZAP!64‘s readers’ music chart in late 1988 had Wizball, Parallax and Combat School in its top ten. Galway also remembered being given a Commodore Computing International award for best music by the Olympic athlete Tessa Sanderson.
Leaving Ocean
In December 1987 Commodore User reported that Galway was “set to leave” Ocean, with Rastan, Combat School and Gryzor still to finish. He later gave the workload as his reason: “they refused to find help for me. I had 5 games ahead of me sometimes.” His replacement, Jonathan Dunn, recalled sending in a demo “just as Martin Galway was preparing to leave the company”.
In August 1988 ZZAP!64 announced “Martin Galway goes Sensible”: he had joined Chris Yates and Jon Hare as the team’s third member. He arrived during Sensible’s work on MicroProse Soccer, and worked with an old schoolfriend, Chris Roberts, on Times of Lore (1988) for Origin Systems. Computer Gaming World announced it “with a soundtrack by Martin Galway”. Galway said he squeezed “the code & data for 25 sound-effects into 923 bytes”.
Origin and after
Origin took him on as a contractor for Times of Lore in 1988 and made him its audio director two years later, according to Cloud Imperium’s 2012 profile of him. In April 1991 The One reported that Origin had hired him to run a sound department of two composers and two sound technicians. At Origin he wrote less music and did more with speech, which, as he pointed out, “simply didn’t exist in the 80’s”. In 1991 he told Computer Gaming World how Origin recorded actors direct to disk, in 16-bit sound at 32 kHz, for the CD-ROM version of Ultima VI. He is credited as audio director on Wing Commander II (1991) and was working on Strike Commander the same year. ACE noted that one guard’s voice in Ultima Underworld (1992) “was recorded by Martin Galway”.
In 1996 Roberts left Origin to found Digital Anvil, and Galway joined shortly afterwards, responsible for the audio on all its games. He earned a credit on the Wing Commander film and worked on the space game Freelancer. In 2001, with Microsoft paying the bills, he joked that the company would “drop a fat wad o’ cash into my bank account every 14 days”. In October 2012 Roberts’s new company, Cloud Imperium Games, introduced him as the man “back in the sound engineer chair again” on Star Citizen, where public reference works list him as audio director. They also say he has since left that post, and do not record what he has worked on since.
Sources
- ZZAP!64, issue 10, February 1986, p. 49: interview with Galway in Manchester (“the nephew of the famous flautist James Galway”; the filters; working within the machine’s limits; Rambo’s themes in 8K).
- ZZAP!64, issue 24, April 1987, p. 39: Arkanoid review (Imagine, £8.95; sound 96%, overall 80%).
- ZZAP!64, issue 40, August 1988: news, “Martin Galway goes Sensible”.
- ZZAP!64, issue 43, November 1988: readers’ music chart (Wizball, Parallax, Combat School).
- Commodore Computing International, November 1986: music review of Knight Rider and Miami Vice.
- Commodore Computing International, September 1987: feature on Ocean (about 40 games since Decathlon; three days for his first tune, six weeks now).
- Commodore User, December 1987: news, “Hubbard going in-house and Galway turning freelance”.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 55, January 1989, p. 32: Origin’s Times of Lore “with a soundtrack by Martin Galway”.
- The One, issue 11, August 1989: Sensible Software’s RPG for Origin. Issue 18, March 1990: A–Z entry on Galway (Arkanoid and Cobra). Issue 31, April 1991: Origin hires Galway. Issue 35, August 1991: Strike Commander, audio director.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 87, October 1991: speech recording for Ultima VI on CD-ROM; Wing Commander II advertisement (audio director Martin Galway).
- ACE, issue 17, February 1989: Sensible Software’s MicroProse Soccer (“new boy Martin Galway”).
- ACE, issue 55, April 1992: Ultima Underworld review (the guard’s voice).
- Retro Gamer, issue 31 (2006): “The Making of Wizball”, with Jon Hare and Galway.
- Retro Gamer: The Commodore 64 Book (2012), “The SID Crowd”, pp. 24–29: panel of C64 composers (Galway on David Collier, his assembly-language method, arpeggios and Kong Strikes Back, the filter, sample playback; Hülsbeck on Arkanoid).
- Retro Gamer, issue 105, August 2012: “The Making of the Daley Thompson Series” (“Rydeen”; Chariots of Fire in Hypersports; the award; Jonathan Dunn).
- Retro Gamer, issue 115, June 2013, pp. 92–93: interview with Chris Hülsbeck (Galway’s “tiny loops of memory”).
- C64.com, “Interview with Martin Galway”, parts 1 and 2 (web, secondary): his family, the BBC Micro, May 1984 at Ocean, Match Day, Roland’s Rat Race, keeping his photo out of magazines, his reasons for leaving, techniques, Athena, Wizball, Digidrums, Times of Lore, Origin and Digital Anvil. https://www.c64.com/interviews/galway.html
- Neil Carr, “An Interview with Martin Galway”, Remix64, 28 March 2001 (web, secondary): working on Freelancer, Microsoft. https://remix64.com/interviews/interview-martin-galway.html
- Cloud Imperium Games, “Meet Martin Galway!”, 22 October 2012 (web, secondary): Origin from 1988, audio director two years later, Digital Anvil from 1996, the Wing Commander film and Freelancer, Star Citizen. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12745-Meet-Martin-Galway
- “Martin Galway”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): “Rydeen” by Yellow Magic Orchestra in Daley Thompson’s Decathlon; audio director on Star Citizen, since left. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Galway