» There is no escape – Project Hubbard assimilates all it
encounters [Art by Trevor Storey Art].Getting that old code back into
a usable state was no mean feat.
“When I worked at EA, when I went
to America, I stored all my source code
disks and a couple of keyboards at EA
UK,” remembers Rob. “Then when I
asked for them, they’d moved office
and when they moved office, they
thought it was a load of trash so they
just put it all in a skip. It was purely by
chance that I happened to keep some
of the source code that I had on a
couple of C64 games that I did at EA,
Kings Of The Beach and Power Play
Hockey – that was a bit of a start,”
he explains.
Rob’s own ingenuity was required
to make more progress, though. “The
rest, I had to actually get SID files and
reverse-engineer them,” he explains.
“I reverse engineered Arcade Classics,
Commando, Sanxion – they all used
different things in the driver, and Iwanted to see how it worked. There
are still some things that are a bit of a
mystery as to how I did it, but I figured
most of it out.”
So how did he find the experience
of returning to the SID chip that helped
establish him as the legendary musicianhe is known to be today? “It’s really
difficult, very difficult I would say,” Rob
laments. “Because the restrictions are
all still there and it all comes flooding
back about what you’re trying to do,
and how you try to overcome the
limitations of just having three and
sometimes four voices. So it comes
flooding back, and the frustrations are
still there.
“You’ve just got to work really hard
to get something out of it. It’s even
worse than that actually, because back
in the day there was nothing else. Back
in the Eighties, there wasn’t anything
else. Nowadays, you’re spoilt for choice
with different kinds of music packages
and sequencers, MIDI and VSTs and all
the rest of it.”
But for someone like Rob who
remembers the scene as it used
to be, the problem isn’t just one of
technology. “You can’t get into the
exact thing that was going on, because
it was a big cultural event as well,” he
explains. “Doing music for games in the
Eighties was a cultural thing – as well as
supporting the games, there was a big
demo scene and culture that was driving
it, and of course that doesn’t exist now.
In terms of part of being of that creative
mindset, it’s not there, so that makes it
even harder to try to do anything.”
Also available and funded by the
Kickstarter is a 300-page book, Rob
Hubbard: The Official Reference Book.
“The book is basically a reference
of most of the stuff that I’ve worked
on, some musical examples and
some anecdotes. A guy called Kenny
McAlpine’s been doing some things on
that, and I’ve had to send him PDFs of
various musical examples, and I sent
Chris some stuff about what I was
doing before I went into C64 stuff.”T
he other big project Rob
is involved with is 8-Bit
Symphony. This concert
is due to take place on 15
June 2019 at Hull City Hall, with music
performed by the Hull Philharmonic
Orchestra. As well as Rob’s work,
a number of games will have their
music represented at 8-Bit Symphony,
including Green Beret, Barbarian II
and The Last Ninja. The event will be
supporting the charities SpecialEffect
and Macmillan Cancer Support, and
pays special tribute to late videogame
composers Richard Joseph and Ben
Daglish – the latter of whom was a key
part of arranging the concert before he
passed away late last year. Tickets are
available from £15.Nowadays, you’re spoilt for
choice with different kinds of
music packages
Rob Hubbard» Although Rob worked on other plat forms, he’ll always be most heavily associated with the Commodore 6 4.
» Rob has been involved in past game music per formances, as seen here with the late Ben Daglish [Photo by Peter Sanden].
RETRO GAMER | 13ROB HUBBARD: PROJECT HUBBARD AND 8-BIT SYMPHONY