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

that kind of puts me, game minus five, graphics, you know, like two, music, like, A. “Ok, so
that’s what I’m gonna do!” [-11:05] So, I started sending demos out and eventually somebody
“give us a brake” and I started doing tunes. The earliest things that I did was for Mastertronics
that were the Actionbiker [1985] and the Thing on a Spring [1985] for Gremlin Graphics.
I wanna talk a little bit about how it all happened, how that all evolved into a culture.
What happened was, [11:45-] in the early days when I started doing that stuff, it was very
much like “I’m gonna do something which I think is very the middle of the road”, and very
toylike. So those early games where very simple kind of games, and [had] very simple little
tunes. Then something strange happened. After somewhere around about, what was that game
called, oh god, it was after One Man and His Droid [1985], which was one of the early
games, the game after The Last V8 [1985], and another game called Phantoms of the Asteroid
[1985], where basically they would let me write whatever I wanted to write. And everybody
thought, well, everything was just fantastic! And at that time it turned into just a dream of a
job, because, you were getting paid money for writing exactly what ever you wanted to write.
And not only that, it got ever more bizarre, because it developed into, a culture, a cultural
thing. One of the things that happened was a demo-scene that started to evolve, because of
that.[-13:25] [13:26-] There was a huge pirate scene in Germany at that time of hackers and
crackers, and people like that. I was telling one of the guys yesterday about it. They used to
call me up and say “What are you working on? What game are you working on?” and I’d say
“I’m doing this thing for Software Projects called Dragons Lair” [Dragons Lair II: Escape
from Singe’s Castle, 1987] or something. And they say “Have you finished it?”, and I says
“Yeah, I just sent all my stuff off. The game is supposed to be released in a couple of weeks”.
And they had like great pride in cracking the game. They would send me a disc of a cracked
game before it was released! [skratt i publiken] And they’d put their own message on there,
scrolling message, and stuff. There was a period that I went through, where every morning, I
would get up and the postman would come (in those days the postman would come twice a
day), the postman would come and knock on the door and there’d be a bloody big pile of
discs. Later on, there would be another bloody big pile of discs, and they’re all from these
different kinds of crackgroups. They had such pride in [it]. They wanted to be the first, not
only to send me a copy of the game before it was released, but with their own messages on
there. [-14:50]
[14:53-] One of the other things that was around, probably, I don’t know, 1986, 1987,
there was this thing called the CompuNet. I don’t know if anybody’s ever has heard of
CompuNet, but this was in the early days of the modem. They used to have this ugly looking
device that would go onto your telephone and there was a box that you would hook up to a
C 64. It used to run at 72 Board, so, if anybody knows anything about modems, the telephone
modems that fits on a PC runs at 156 k Board, and this used to run at 72 Board. That’s
literally one character a second, 8 by 8 pixels. Anyway, a lot of people subscribed to this
CompuNet-thing, that was also, basically, a way to send text messages. I was like a real
primitive type of chat room back then. The only problem was that this used to create
horrendous phone bills. But, that also helped to develop this whole culture. [-16:12]
Then, I would say round about 1986, the whole kind of C 64 game scene had really
changed a lot and developed into this kind of European culture thing, where not only did the
games reflect a certain culture, but the music also reflected the culture as well. [-16:50] The
music at that time was really heavily influenced by a lot of the other things that was going on
around the 1980’s, like for instance, in the 1980’s there was a new romantic movement going
on, a lot of synthbands were playing. A lot of the people who were involved on the early days
of the C 64 were all listening to people like Jean Michel Jarre and Kraftwerk, all these kinds
of bands, and so that influenced what people did. [-17:25-] And also, because of the fact that
there were only three voices to play with, that also limited what you could do musically. So
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