Rob Hubbard Thrusts into 1986
Rob Hubbard had a stellar 1985, ending on a personal high with “Kentilla”, one of his favourite pieces and one that he poured love into.
The new year of 1986 started a lot quieter though, with Rob working on a run of budget games. Of these “Thrust” was his most well-known... and he sometimes played it live!
... and “Knight Tyme” was simply sheet music that was converted to the Spectrum 128, Amstrad CPC and MSX versions of the game (the C64 one came much later with music from the omnipresent David Whittaker).
Five-a-Side Soccer was also sheet music, and only for the Amstrad.
Two important things then happened: the first is that Mastertronic asked for not only a soundtrack to the Commodore 64 version of their new Entertainment USA game “Ninja”, but also for an Atari 8-bit version of the game.
At this time, the previously expensive Atari 8-bit platform was becoming gradually less expensive, and 1986 would see Atari versions of International Karate (which was heading stateside) and Warhawk (which Firebird seemed to want on every platform in existence).
Also, thanks to being roped in by Tynesoft’s Mike Mann (previously of Ubik, those legally clumsy weeta-figures behind Razzmatazz), he composed a jaunty Atari tune for Jet Set Willy. It was of course the best thing about the game, Software Projects’ quality control for this old IP long having left the building.
That's a tall collection of Willies
Luckily Rob’s schedule was sufficient to give him the time port his code to the Atari and put in some interesting code taking advantage of the Atari’s POKEY chip, especially its “distortion” feature (inherited from the sound on the Atari 2600’s TIA chip). This really made the sound interesting (think about the grinding bassline on Warhawk for an example of something that no other home computer could do).
Developing the Atari Driver for Ninja gave Rob some good programming ideas about vectors, wavetables, and function pointers to take back to the C64 driver, which ended up in the experimental driver for “Hollywood or Bust” (which was also used in “The Chicken Song”). And so, weirdly, the last tune done in Rob’s “classic” driver was a piss-take. I'll show you Hollywood or Bust instead, from the cruel fingers that programmed "The Human Race".
The Chicken Song would never have happened without the existence of “Compunet”, the C64’s very own online system which was frequented by the great and the good of the C64 scene, giving rise to the careers of musicians Matt Gray, Jonathan Dunn, Wally Beben (and lots of others), and publicising the wares of Tony Crowther and Ben Daglish’s new “W.E.M.U.S.I.C” (“We Make Use of Sound In Computers”). It also resulted in demo teams being given game programming jobs, and a lot of showing off.
For part of 1986 (until he got the phone bill), Rob was highly active on Compunet and it was this activity and involvement in the scene that, when the game W.A.R from demo programmers Stoat & Tim required his services, it prompted him to make a much more serious-sounding driver for a new, more serious creative outlook. To go with this new sound, he resurrected and expanded one of his musically sophisticated previous scores. He added an end part to the tune that is in his words “nuts”, which is why he left it out of the 8-Bit Symphony version.
While his new driver was programmed in April 1986 it took until September 1987 before audiences heard it in the game (though they heard it a lot sooner than that if they were on Compuserve, thanks to a “W.A.R Preview” demo.
It was a whole new Rob. Not everyone enjoyed the new sound immediately, partly because the tune is a world away from the accessible bounciness of “Thing on a Spring”, but some of the later tunes he did this year really showed off a driver where even the bouncy tunes sounded more mature. One in particular took a fair few months to arrive, coming hot on the heels of “W.A.R” - Thalamus’s “Sanxion”.
But when it did arrive and people heard the loading theme, it was another major milestone in Rob’s career, and was something that simply couldn’t have been done in the old driver, just like “Thing on a Spring” couldn’t have been done properly in the “Razzmatazz” driver.
Musically, Rob was running on all cylinders and intricate-yet-epic hits such as Flash Gordon, Knuckle Busters, Light Force and Dragon’s Lair II: Escape from Singe’s castle just flowed out.
Talking of Dragon’s Lair II, that marked another major milestone: Rob going Z80 for the first time. Games prior to that had been all about the sheet music (or some poor guy translating the tune by ear, as happened in Flash Gordon). But given that David Whittaker needed an Atari driver and Rob needed one for the AY-3-8912 found in the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, they did a swap (the driver given to Rob was actually an Amstrad driver but the changes needed for the Spectrum 128 were minimal).
This was both a good and a bad idea: it made him even more attractive to companies for work, a one-stop shop. It was bad because he didn’t like the chip, and because the overload of work for the platform contributed to a months-long period of stress in 1987.
However, after the release (and glorious reception) of Sanxion in November 1987, Rob had plenty of time to indulge his friend ex-ZZAP! 64-er and now “Thalamus guy” Gary Liddon, who had many innovative ideas for the next Thalamus release: Delta.
This was lucky because the in-game tune was wildly complicated and drove Rob nuts. It’s clear from listening to Delta - the title, the victory theme, the in-game and the Mix-E-Load that time was poured into it: it was a real labour of love. Another labour of love was “Deep Strike”, because that contained a spirited version of the John Williams classic “Theme from 1941”. Rob was, and is, a huge John Williams fan and thinks every musician should study him!
Actually a fan-pic of the loading screen, much better than the original!
However, in the coming year of 1987, Rob was about to discover that success always has a price. But, as we know, the white charger to take him away from the stress was close at hand, only a sample-playing routine away!
To read more about Rob Hubbard’s stellar life and career, don’t miss “Master of Magic”, the official illustrated softography with over 350 pages of exclusive content you won’t want to miss: a surprise on almost every page!