In October 1985 ZZAP!64 reviewed a platform game about a mole on the run from prison and spent much of the review talking about the music. “The first thing that really impressed me about this game was the incredible piece of music that bursts forth once the program has loaded,” one reviewer wrote. “Full of ‘clapping’, violins, some nifty little twiddly bits and even a brilliant guitar solo, it’s certainly the best I’ve heard on the 64 yet … It’s almost worth buying for the music alone!” The game was Gremlin Graphics’ Monty on the Run, and the reviewer called its composer, Rob Hubbard, “a SID chip wizard extraordinaire”.
Hubbard was not a teenage programmer. He was thirty, a trained musician who had learned to program the Commodore 64 because he thought he could write better music for it than he was hearing. ZZAP!’s readers voted his tunes the best of 1985 and again of 1986.
A musician first
Public reference works give his birthplace as Hull. ZZAP! reported in 1985 that he had “been in the music biz since he left school”. The Games Machine added in 1987 that he had dropped out of university to play keyboards in a band and, when the band did not make it, gone to music college. The magazine said he saw himself “as a composer of music rather than a ‘games musician’”, and that if he did not have to earn money from game soundtracks he would probably spend his time playing soul, R ‘n’ B and blues on a Hammond organ.
He looked back on how he started in The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels:
Originally I viewed game music as simply dire — wrong notes all over the place and simply bad musically. That’s why I started: I thought I could at least get the notes right! I didn’t think of it as pioneering. We simply got on with it and had a lot of fun doing it. Yes it was also additional income to help pay the bills.
The route in was not smooth. At a round-table with other composers in ZZAP! in 1986, he said he had spent a long time writing educational software, then wrote a game for a software house that went bust, and “it took about eight months before I could get a break”. He named the tune that first made him take computer music seriously as the one in Jammin’, a Taskset game.
1985: Thing on a Spring and Monty on the Run
His first widely heard tunes came in 1985. ZZAP! listed his early work as the music for Mastertronic’s Action Biker, Confuzion and Gremlin’s Thing on a Spring. Reviewing Thing on a Spring in August 1985, one ZZAP! reviewer praised its “exceptional piece of music (I’ve never heard anything so marvellous on the 64)”, and another gave up describing it: “The sound is unbelievable, I won’t describe it but just wait until you hear it; words fail.”
Julian Rignall spoke to him for the same issue. Hubbard had been inspired by the music in two Activision games, Master of the Lamps and Rock ‘n’ Bolt, so he “connected his black and white monitor to his hi-fi and started to program his own music utility”. He did not use a commercial music program, because he found them “very limited with the sounds you can create”, and he had spent four months refining his own. He sketched tunes on a Casio MT-30 keyboard, then worked them out on the C64. Some of the Monty voices he had found by accident while tinkering, but the drums, which imitate a Simmons electronic drum kit, took two weeks. He already felt he was “getting near to the limits of the 64 sound chip” and found its three channels limiting.
ZZAP!’s readers voted the Monty on the Run music the best of 1985, with 27% of the vote. Thing on a Spring came joint second.
Commando, Crazy Comets and Sanxion
For Elite’s C64 conversion of Commando (1985), Hubbard’s tune came at a price. Chris Butler, who programmed the game, told ZZAP! in 1986 that the game had been “completely finished”, but “when Rob Hubbard came down he said that he needed about 6K for the music, and there wasn’t room”. Elite’s Steve Wilcox answered: “Right — hack out level three.” The music has its own legend: a caption in The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels says it “was created overnight at Elite’s offices”.
His output in 1985 and 1986 was large. Gary Penn called the music for Martech’s Crazy Comets “probably his best piece to date”. In ZZAP!‘s readers’ awards for 1986, Thalamus’s Sanxion won the music category with 17%, twice the votes of his Knucklebusters in second place. In the best programmer category, “strange as it may seem”, he came fourth with 4%, behind Andrew Braybrook, Chris Butler and Jeff Minter.
The Pixels book also credits him with faithful covers of other people’s music: Synergy for Master of Magic and Cabaret Voltaire for I, Ball.
How he did it
Hubbard wrote the playback code as well as the music. The Games Machine explained in 1987 that C64 games usually left “about 4K of memory for sound”, and that his success lay in “the library of self-written routines that he has built up”, which took up very little memory but got the most out of the chip. Much of his effect came from switching notes faster than the ear can follow. One voice could play a rapid sequence of notes or alternate quickly between them, an arpeggio, so three voices seemed to play more than three parts.
Some of his loaders let the listener join in. ZZAP! reported in March 1987 that Palace Software’s Stifflip & Co. would have “an innovative DIY Rob Hubbard loading tune which can be changed and manipulated while the program loads”, and Thalamus’s Delta (1987) had a similar feature, “Mix-E-Load”.
Not everyone was won over. In October 1986 Greg Barnett of Melbourne House told ZZAP! that Hubbard “used nice instruments at first but his music hasn’t improved. The music on International Karate sounds like the music from Thing on a Spring slowed down.”
To Electronic Arts
In 1987 Hubbard began working for Electronic Arts in the United States. The Games Machine reported in October that he had “nipped off to the States for a couple of months to work for Electronic Arts”. In December Commodore User ran the story “Hubbard going in-house and Galway turning freelance”: Hubbard looked set to join EA full-time, and EA’s Mark Lewis said the two were “negotiating towards establishing a long term relationship”.
His C64 music for EA’s Skate or Die was popular with readers: in 1988 ZZAP! printed a way to remix “that excellent Rob Hubbard title tune”, and Skate or Die and Delta sat at the top of the magazine’s readers’ music chart. When a reader asked in December 1988 why no one had heard from him, ZZAP! replied that “the last word we heard was that he was still working for EA in the USA.”
According to public reference works, he moved from Newcastle to the United States in 1988, became EA’s audio technical director, and returned to England in 2002.
Looking back
In 2001 Edge found him at a C64 music reunion in Birmingham, surrounded by fans. He was surprised by the attention. “I live in the States,” he said, and there the scene did not exist. “All this happened 16 years ago, for God’s sake. It’s really interesting. It represents a unique time in history, and it’ll probably never be repeated, because of the way the business has changed.” Did he miss it? “Yeah, in a lot of ways I do. A lot of the more natural creativity that was around isn’t around these days.”
He went on appearing at retro events. At the Retro Ball in 2005 he gave a panel audience his summary of the industry: “Making games in the 80’s was great fun, nowadays it sucks.”
Sources
- ZZAP!64, issue 4, August 1985, p. 18: Thing on a Spring review.
- ZZAP!64, issue 6, October 1985, pp. 16–17: Monty on the Run review and Julian Rignall’s piece on Rob Hubbard.
- ZZAP!64, Christmas Special 1985 (issue 9), p. 102: review of the year, Gary Penn on Crazy Comets.
- ZZAP!64, issue 12, April 1986: readers’ awards for 1985, best music.
- ZZAP!64, issue 16, August 1986, p. 40: “The Musicians’ Ball”, round-table with Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish, Tony Crowther and David Whittaker.
- ZZAP!64, issue 17, September 1986, p. 104: Gary Penn’s interview with Chris Butler on Commando.
- ZZAP!64, issue 18, October 1986, pp. 47–48: interview with Greg Barnett of Melbourne House.
- ZZAP!64, issue 23, March 1987, p. 83: readers’ awards for 1986; news of Palace Software’s Stifflip & Co.
- The Games Machine, issue 1, October 1987, p. 111: feature on programming music for games, profile of Rob Hubbard.
- Commodore User, December 1987: news, “Hubbard going in-house and Galway turning freelance”.
- ZZAP!64, issue 38, June 1988: Skate or Die tip. Issue 41, September 1988: readers’ music chart. Issue 44, December 1988: letters page.
- The Story of the Commodore 64 in Pixels (Fusion Retro Books), p. 52: Hubbard’s recollection of why he began, Thing on a Spring, the covers for Master of Magic and I, Ball, and the caption on Commando.
- Edge, issue 100, August 2001: report on the C64 music reunion in Birmingham.
- Retro Gamer, issue 20 (2005): report on the Retro Ball; the same issue’s feature on loading games mentions Delta’s “Mix-E-Load”.
- Wikipedia, “Rob Hubbard” (web, secondary): year and place of birth, the move from Newcastle to EA in 1988, his role as audio technical director, and his return to England in 2002.