Rob Hubbard
Composer of the Commodore
Rob Hubbard squeezed orchestral drama out of the SID chip, defining the sound of mid-80s C64 gaming.
Rob Hubbard’s C64 soundtracks—Monty on the Run, Commando, International Karate—pushed the SID chip to its musical limits. A formally trained musician turned programmer, Hubbard composed and coded his own playback routines, blending arpeggios, filters and pulse-width modulation into hooks people still hum.
In his own words, in 1985
ZZAP!64 sent Julian Rignall to interview him in October 1985, while Monty on the Run was still on shelves, and the piece is the best contemporary account of how he worked.
He was thirty years old and had “been in the music biz since he left school” — a working musician before he was a game composer, not a programmer who took up music. What pulled him to the C64 was hearing two Activision titles, Master of the Lamps and Rock ‘n’ Bolt: they inspired him “enough to start experimenting with the 64’s SID chip”.
📘 The setup is the detail worth keeping. He connected his black-and-white monitor to his hi-fi and wrote his own music utility, because he judged the commercial ones “very limited with the sounds you can create”. That is the whole method in one sentence: the tools did not exist, so he built them, and his advantage over other composers was as much software as it was music.
Why he started
He did not set out to be a games composer. He was a gigging musician who had written a game for an educational software company; when that company went out of business he moved to what he was better at. Asked much later what he thought of the music already on the machine, he was blunt:
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.
That is worth setting against how he is usually described. The standard account has Hubbard as the man who realised what the SID could do; his own is a working musician who heard wrong notes and thought he could do better, for money. The results are the same and the story is not.
His breakthrough in reputation came with the theme from Gremlin’s Thing on a Spring. The catalogue also includes accurate cover versions — Synergy’s Master of Magic and Cabaret Voltaire, the latter in the sample-heavy I, Ball.
Fast facts
- Technique: wrote his own playback routines and editing utility rather than using off-the-shelf tools, refining them across games.
- Career arc: began working with Electronic Arts in 1987 and moved to the United States early in 1988, starting with the C64 version of Skate or Die!. He shifted over time from composing to audio technical direction, building the tools other composers used.