Musikaliska uttryck och funktioner i interaktiva v rldar - C64.com

you tended to….the limitations of the machine forced you to write in a certain kind of stylistic
way, which helped to develop that culture. [-17:54]
The other thing about being involved in the early days of what was going on, was that
there was a real sense of, this, you didn’t know it at the time, but you were riding this whole
tidal wave of development. But at the time, there was a lot of pioneering going on with
everything to do with games, and music and computers and the sense of freedom that people
had at those days was just extraordinary, because you could branch out and do pretty much
whatever you wanted to do. [-18:48] As long as it didn’t sound like this drunken monkey
trying to play the Blue Danube, people would really be happy with what was going on.
[-18:59] Looking back on those days, the sense of enjoyment was just unbelievable, because,
like I said, watching everybody here reminds me of what I used to be like in the 1980’s. I had
an absolute blast! I mean, I loved every minute of it! I just couldn’t wait to get out of bed, get
up the next morning and switch on the machine. [-19:32] I would dream up some crazy thing
that I could add to the assembly language routine, to do something, and I couldn’t wait to
code it up and see if I could get this thing to do whatever I wanted it to do. It was just an
absolute…probably for me I would say that, that was probably the most fun that I’ve ever had
in the video game business over the last 15 to 20 years, because it was that sense of absolute
freedom and that sense that you could just do whatever you want. [-20:17]
The way that we did things in those days was purely…people often say to me: “Did you
have a MIDI sequencer?” Well there were no MIDI-sequencers. “Did you have a tracker?”,
No there were no trackers. “What did you use?” The answer to that question is that we all
used purely an Assembler and we coded everything up in an Assembler. “Well how did you
edit the music?” Well, what I used to do was load up a machine code monitor and I would
literally display the bites in real-time. The music was all working on, triggered on the raster
interrupt, so I would start changing the numbers in real-time to alter the synths to alter
musical notes and things. I would tend to work on like four-bar chunks, that I would get to
repeat, let these four bars play, and I would just sit on that hex editor, monitoring the numbers
and changing things. [-21:36] 3C hex would be a C, 4 hex would be a C, 30 would be a C and
I used to know these numbers backwards. If the high bit was sent that was an indication of a
patched change. And I would sit and tweak all those numbers till I had my four bars pretty
much the way I wanted them to sound, and that would let me then continue on and expand for
another sixteen bars, or something like that. [-22:17]
A few other strange things happened in the 80’s. I could tell you a few stories that
happened. [22:38-] The Commando story is interesting because this guy calls me up at, like, 2
o’clock in the afternoon, and says, the guy from Elite Systems calls me up and says, “I’ve
booked you a train ticket to come down from Newcastle to Birmingham. Can you be on the
train?”. I says: ”No, I’m dead busy, you know.” He says: “I’m desperate. I need some sound
for this game, so I’ve booked you a ticket, can you be on?” And I says “How much are you
gonna pay?”, you know, He says, “You say a figure”, and I said, “I’ll do it for that.” So, I get
on that train in 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I get down in Birmingham in about half past 5 and
he takes me to the pub! [skratt] Then, eventually, we goes back to the office in about 8
o’clock and “This is for the Commando-game” and I start to work on the Commando-thing.
Then everybody goes home and I’m left in the office on my own. I have like game music, and
I have Highscore, and then I gotta do, look at the game and got to do a list of all the sound
effects and do all this stuff. Anyway, I work through the night, and I got all the sound effects
done, and I finished up at about 8 o’clock in the morning. There was these rows of these
benches where the people had all their C 64s, so what I did was that I, [skratt] before
everybody came in, I loaded the music up on every one of these C 64s and I turned it up as
loud as I could. When everybody came in it was just this absolute cacophony of all these
machines playing the Commando-music. And then I got on the train and went home [-24:32]
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