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Skaven

Peter Hajba: Future Crew's musician and artist, later at Remedy

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Skaven (Peter Hajba) wrote music and drew graphics for Future Crew from 1992, including part of the music of Second Reality, and won Assembly music competitions in 1993, 1995 and 2002. He went on to write music for games such as Unreal Tournament and Bejeweled 2, and to work on textures, animation and sound at Remedy Entertainment.

In the summer of 1993 Future Crew’s Second Reality won the PC demo competition at Assembly ’93, and at the same party Skaven’s tune “Ice Frontier” won the multichannel music competition. He was 18, one of the group’s two musicians alongside Purple Motion, and he wrote part of Second Reality‘s music. Skaven was Peter Hajba. He drew as well as composed, and when the demo years ended he took both skills into the games industry: music for other studios’ games, and textures, animation and sound effects for Remedy Entertainment, where, as he put it in 2008, “I have made no music whatsoever for Remedy.”

Fast facts

  • Real name: Peter Hajba, born 1974.
  • Group: Future Crew, from early 1992; later Brainstorm.
  • Role: music and graphics.
  • Competition wins at Assembly: “Ice Frontier” (1993), “Catch That Goblin” (1995), “The Goblin Returns” (2002).
  • Games: music for Unreal Tournament (1999), Bejeweled 2 (2004) and Bookworm; graphics and sound at Remedy on Max Payne, Max Payne 2 and Alan Wake.

Future Crew

Future Crew’s READ.ME for Second Reality and its information file of October 1993 list “Skaven, Peter Hajba, 18, Musician”. The group’s history says he joined at the start of 1992 with Trug, Pixel and Abyss, and lists his job as “Music & GFX”.

Hajba said in a 2008 interview with the scene magazine ZINE that his real start came when he got hold of Scream Tracker, the music editor written by Future Crew’s Psi: “Being able to write songs and save them was a turning point for me.” He had no equipment to speak of. He was 15 before he got his first synthesiser, a second-hand Casio CZ-101, and he could not sample from it, “so I had to use samples from other tracker songs.”

Second Reality’s end credits give him the music on the first three of their screens and on one later screen, and share the graphics of two parts between him and Pixel. Purple Motion’s name is on the music of the rest. He released a music disk of his own, Chaotic Mind, which British public-domain libraries were selling by 1994. At Assembly ’95, with the group no longer making demos, he won the 32-channel music competition “by a WIDE margin”, the group’s history says, with “Catch That Goblin”. Seven years later the sequel, “The Goblin Returns”, won the instrumental music competition at Assembly 2002.

Into games

Hajba was studying cartoon animation at Ballyfermot Senior College in Dublin, and planning two more years of computer animation, when Samuli Syvähuoko, Future Crew’s former organiser, phoned. “He called me and asked if I’d like to work for a game company. I said ‘why not?’ and returned to Finland.” That was, he said in 2008, “some 12 years ago”.

At Remedy he worked in several fields. ZINE listed textures, character animation, particles and sound effects, and he mentioned “processing 1200 voice-overs” as the dull side of the job. The music in Remedy’s games came from others: “They hire professionals for that.” Credit lists compiled by Wikipedia and the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation record his work on the sound of Max Payne (2001), Max Payne 2 (2003) and Alan Wake (2010).

His music went to other studios’ games. Both sources credit him with music for Epic’s Unreal Tournament (1999) and for PopCap’s puzzle games, Bejeweled among them. In the 2008 interview he talked about remixing his Bejeweled 2 soundtrack, about the long in-game theme he wrote for Hap Hazard, and about Bookworm, where “the game occasionally switches from ‘normal’ to ‘danger’, and the music changes accordingly”. The Preservation Foundation’s list continues with audio design credits on Just Cause 3 (2015) and Rage 2 (2019).

He also remembered one Future Crew game that never happened. In 2022 he told Time Extension that a planned game based on Illuminatus, an imaginary space game invented as an April fool by the Finnish magazine MikroBitti, “never progressed far beyond just some discussion about cool ideas (‘generate everything procedurally from a seed number based on a word’, just like No Man’s Sky)”.

Back to the scene

By 2008 Hajba had joined the demo group Brainstorm. “These days it’s always great to see old friends at parties,” he told ZINE, and he called the scene “a good hobby, since it combines different areas of creativity and encourages teamwork”.

Sources

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