Talk:Neil Baldwin
From Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki
Contents
Commentary
Neil's old website contained his commentary on the NES games and songs he worked on.
Magician (NES)
This is where it all began. I was one of the founders of Eurocom (I'm still a Director there but that's a whole other story) and this was our first game together on the NES (or "Famicom" as we knew it: we brought the consoles back from Japan when we went out to visit our publisher, Taxan). We had no development hardware just half-a-dozen Famicom consoles and a badly photocopied hardware specification that was 99% written in Japanese! What we lacked in resources, we clearly made up for in boundless determination. Luckily for us, our parent company (at the time) employed the skills of a really talented electronics engineer, Richard Alton, who managed to reverse engineer (and build) some flash-ROM cartridges and together with an old 6502 editor/assembler, "PDS", we had ourselves a rudimentary development kit! I remember myself and Tim Rogers (now Technical Director at Eurocom) visiting the languages department at Sheffield University with the photocopied Japanese NES manual and with the help of two Japanese girls we deciphered a lot of the technical information. They're uncredited in the history of Eurocom but looking back, I'm not quite sure how we'd have progressed without their help! I'd written my own music/audio drivers for the C64 and so, with the invaluable help of Tim Rogers, I set about trying to do the same for the NES. One thing I got to quickly realise was how utterly unsophisticated the NES was compared to the C64 and began to understand why most NES music sounded the way it did - you just couldn't do much else with it! NES Audio Channels Channel A : Square, 4 pulse widths, amplitude Channel B : Square, 4 pulse widths, amplitude Channel C : Triangle, no amplitude Channel D : Noise, 15 frequencies, amplitude Channel E : Delta-modulation (1-bit) samples And that was it! I was always baffled by the exclusion of an amplitude setting for the triangle-wave channel - it certainly would've made things slightly simpler when trying to balance the sounds. I made quite a lot of use of the delta-modulation channel in 'Magician' though it was the only time I ever did. I can't actually remember why. I'd imagine that it was because the samples themselves would use up so much ROM space that it would be considered a luxury item. So eventually we had a music driver. There were no tools to speak of so everything was entered as numbers in the assembler/editor. Later on I turned the numbers for command codes into macros to make entering and reading the sequences of notes a little easier but that's as sophisticated as it got. I worked out tunes on a little Yamaha keyboard and typed in the pitches and durations. Often I'd work out timings on some squared graph paper, mostly by trial and error. Obviously I'm skipping over a lot of detail, otherwise I'd be here all week writing this. Anyway, the music. Looking back at this stuff it's difficult to remember what influenced me. I can still hear a lot of things inspired by Rob Hubbard and, to a lesser extent Martin Galway - inevitable really considering my C64 background. I was listening to Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream and a lot of other electronica/new age stuff. Surprising really that I'm actually a guitarist and only learned keyboard/piano/synth playing because I had to in order to transcribe stuff from my head to the NES. Having said that, many of the slow arpeggios that formed the basis of the backing to many of the tunes would've definitely been written initially on the guitar. Track 1 Logically this would've been the first thing I ever wrote for the NES. Straight off the bat it's obvious I was influenced by Rob Hubbard with that lead sound that had the initial attack played an octave above the actual note. I remember I'd call this the "pluck" setting for the sound patch - again, clearly a side-effect of being a guitarist. Track 3 Good one this. I employed the common trick of putting alternate note on two channels to give a nice echo/reverby sound. I also used a delayed exaggerated vibrato (heard in the last half of the loop) which gave it a eerie element. I can't actually remember what bit of the game it was for, I think it was the puzzle rooms. Track 4 Probably one of my best tunes. I tended to just play around with sounds and then get inspired to arrange something. With this one I approached it, uncharacteristically, by writing a tune first. I also used the noise channel to add what was meant to be a cymbal crescendo but sounded more like synthesized wind! I came to use this (and other sound effects in my music) quite a lot. Track 7 This was the title theme for Magician. Quite obviously influenced by Martin Galway with that slow-attack square-wave lead sound. Came in quite long this one. I spotted on a web site a while back that it was one of the top 10 longest pieces of music on the NES. One of few accolades. Track 8 Discovered that you could make the delta-modulation snare sample sound a bit crisper by layering it with some white noise. Track 10 I remember this one: the forest. Again, using sound effects in the music to try to convey some atmosphere. Has some nice fast-arpeggio chords later on. I read an interesting post on a forum recently where my music style had been labeled "euro style" (along with a bunch of other european game music composers) which was apparently typified by the use of the fast-arpeggio sound to simulate chords, following on from it's ubiquitous use in C64 music. Pretty accurate analysis and I did tend to use it quite a lot in all my NES music. Track 11 Sounds to me like something Dave Brubeck might have done if he had a NES. How odd!
James Bond Jr. (NES)
I don't honestly remember much about this game apart from it being loosely based on the comic/cartoon of the same name. I continued development of the music drivers, probably one of the key changes being me dropping the use of delta-mod samples. Instead I started using the old C64 trick of synthesizing drums sounds by rapidly stuffing numbers into the noise voice (and the triangle-wave voice). Another old C64 trick I employed a lot in James Bond Jr (and continued to do so for almost all the other NES projects I worked on) was to simulate echo but just using a single voice. Instead of using two voices, one playing a melody and the second at a lower volume but slightly delayed, the single-voice method used slightly truncated note lengths and in the gaps in between notes, play the same notes shifted later in time, quickly dropping the voice volume (and then restoring it to play the next melody note). OK, that's not the clearest explanation. Here's an illustration of the technique. I've laid it out in a kind-of "tracker" format for ease of illustration, though this is not how I actually put the music together (more on this in later projects). A melody with a second voice for the echo might look like; ChA ... ChB ... C 4 V10 --- V05 --- --- --- --- --- --- C 4 --- --- --- --- --- D 4 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- D 4 --- --- --- --- --- E 4 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- E 4 --- --- --- --- --- D 4 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- D 4 --- --- --- --- --- Whereas using the single channel trick, you'd do this; ChA ... C 4 V10 --- --- C 4 V05 --- --- D 4 V10 --- --- D 4 V05 --- --- E 4 V10 --- --- E 4 V05 --- --- D 4 V10 --- --- D 4 V05 --- --- So it gives you a similar effect to the two voice method but with the obvious benefit of not tying up the second voice. The results are very dependent on what you've got going on in the melody - the busier the better, it doesn't really work for long, held notes. It does work great for those trademark arpeggio-chords that me and my fellow euro-composers are so fond of :) Anyway, the music. Track 1 Something else that I dabbled with in this track (and a few others in this project) was trying to not only synthesize basic drums like kick, snare and hi-hats but also 808-sounding percussion/toms. It sounds a bit too busy in this particular track but I think it reasonably effective. Actually something that's just struck me about all of the tracks in this project is that they could all do with being slowed down ever-so-slightly, they sound a bit rushed. Problem was, I never had any sort of tempo control when typing/editing the music sequences and so it would've been a tedious job to go through and slightly alter all the note durations! Track 4 Yet another old C64 trick in this one. Once the simple melody comes in (about 0:30), I filed the gaps in the melody with some short arpeggio chords. Rob Hubbard was the absolute master of this technique on the C64. Track 6 Perfect example of the single-voice-echo technique from the start of this track.
Lethal Weapon (NES)
I never expected so many people would be that interested in me rambling on about all this stuff but based on the attention from a few websites and all the emails, it seems you are! I really and truly appreciate all the kind words and I'm deeply flattered that so many of you think I made a positive contribution to NES audio. A few people have asked why I only did so few game titles and the answer is fairly simple. Back then I wasn't just writing game audio 24/7. Because Eurocom was in it's infancy it meant rolling up my sleeves and getting involved in all sorts of different stuff; game design, programming, level design, debugging, testing etc. In reality, over the course of a project, the amount of time actually spent coding music and SFX was quite small. Plus, obviously, I was working exclusively for Eurocom and Eurocom only did a handful of of NES games. *cough* plusiwasneverthefastestworkerintheworld *cough* ;) Anyway, to repeat what I've recently posted over on 2A03.org and The Shizz, in an attempt to keep all the information in one place and to save me from having to post the same answers in several different places, it's my intention to answer people's questions directly here. I'd like to attribute the questions to the people that ask them but if you'd rather remain anonymous, for whatever reason, just let me know. Otherwise assume that anything you send me via email or ask on another website might become part of the content on here. Q&A; will start next time, meanwhile here's the next music installment... Lethal Weapon 3. Sometime around 1992, Eurocom was in trouble. We had no money (actually, make that negative money) and the relationship with the publisher of what would've been our third proper NES title deteriorated to the point that the game was never released (more on this in future updates). We couldn't afford to really pay ourselves and Lethal Weapon 3 was one of those projects that came along that we had to do just to pay the bills. This didn't go unnoticed. To quote Wikipedia: 'It is considered by many to be extremely difficult and frustrating in the fact that punching an enemy is more effective than shooting an enemy. It has minimal music and sparse interesting scenery.' Sounds about right :S In an attempt to balance the karma, I just bought the (actually rather good) OST by Michael Kamen (plus Clapton, Sting and David Sandborn) from Amazon for £1.58. I mention it only because the couple of NES tracks of any real merit took ideas from the film soundtrack. I'll come back to that in a minute. Anyway, the music. Track 1 This was the title track and I actually quite like it because I tried to do something a little bit different. As well as the usual drum track using voice C & D, I tried to program a syncopated tom tom bit using voice B (comes in around the minute mark). I think it was actually quite effective. The only downside, obviously, is the loss of one of your melody voices. Can't win 'em all. Tracks 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7 These were all the in-game tracks and there's a reason they sounds a little simple and sparse - they only use voices B, C & D. I deliberately didn't program any audio data for voice A on the tracks that were used in-game. This was because most of the time your character was kicking, punching or shooting something and while the SFX driver was programmed to steal voices from the music only when needed, in this instance the interruptions were so frequent it made a mess of the music. So I made the decision to sacrifice a voice and simplify the music. Having said that, I was quite pleased with how track 6 came out. As I've just been listening to it I thought that the sweeping noise was done with some clever trick but it literally was just 16th notes descending in pitch. Sometimes the simplest things work best. Track 8 I really liked how this came out at the time and a few of you have emailed to say the same. Actually, to quote Chibi-Tech in a post on 2A03.org, 'The guitarwank programming is just soooo smooth'. I'll take that as a compliment :) You'll have to forgive my hazy memory (once again): I know I borrowed some/part of the melody from one of the tracks from the Lethal Weapon 3 OST (I think it was the track 'Riggs and Rog'. I'll know for sure once my copy of the soundtrack arrives from Amazon. There were a couple of instrumental pieces on there that played with the themes from the Clapton/Sting song on the soundtrack "It's Probably Me". However I'm pretty sure it never had the guitarwank faked harmonics in the original. That was my idea and I'm sure Clapton wouldn't have approved. :) Here's a bit of audio driver trivia for you. If you listen carefully to some of the longer notes with vibrato you can sometimes hear a little bit of cyclic clicking. This was a side-effect of the way I programmed the vibrato. On the APU, writing to the register that has the upper 3 bits of the frequency setting causes an audible click. This is because if you are using the hardware envelopes/timers, it's this register you write to to initialise the envelope/timer (I actually don't use the hardware envelopes or timers).This is not so bad at the start of a note where it's hardly noticed but because the APU is being written to every frame in my audio driver, I would only write this register when absolutely necessary. Therefore, because the vibrato programming is making small cyclic adjustments to the lower 8 bits of the frequency setting, most of the time it's not necessary to write the upper 3 bits. However, if when you add a value to the lower 8 bits it causes an overflow and therefore a requirement to increment/decrement the upper 3 bits, it meant that the upper 3 bits register had to be written, causing a cyclic click in the voice output. Normally I'd get around it by transposing the whole track up/down a semi-tone or two until I was lucky enough not to have any long notes that exhibited this side-effect. I didn't always spot them, as you can now hear. If you listen closely.
Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge (NES)
First off, sincere apologies. I've been pretty busy recently and the spare time I have had I've been trying to put together a manual for Nijuu. It's shaping up pretty well and hopefully I'll soon be able to put together a releasable package. I only realised tonight that it's been quite a long time since a proper music entry on the website. So, here we are. Some Eurocom history is required to put this game into context. As I mentioned before, after James Bond Jnr we basically ran out of money and we struggled to find a publisher that was interested in giving us work. As the money ran out, we could no longer afford to pay ourselves a full-time wage so things were getting a little crazy. It was around this time, due to personal circumstances, we parted ways with Chris Shrigley. He was recently married with a baby and a mortgage to pay and simply couldn't afford to stick it out at Eurocom so he sought his fortune elsewhere. A sad day, but under the circumstances it was a tough decision to make. (As a lot of you already know, I collaborated later on a project with Chris but more on that in future updates). In order to keep our heads above water, a few of us touted around for freelance work. I was in quite an ideal position as I had a (small) track record, my own music engine (well, Eurocom's technically but I had their blessing to make use of it) and the fact that there weren't that many freelance musicians that could do NES sound. And I was cheap. I think through a contact of Mat Sneap's (Eurocom Art Director), I got asked to do the music and SFX for "a grand prix game" by old school publisher/developer, System 3. That's about as much as I really knew about the project and I'm embarrassed to say I'd never even seen the game at all until very recently. They'd asked for some rock-style tracks which I thought was a tall order on the NES but I think a couple of the tracks turned out pretty good, if a little short. I also didn't get paid a great deal for the project so I was determined to turn it around in as short a time as possible. (Norrin - I think you know what I'm setting the scene for :) One eagle-eyed NES fan spotted that one of the Ferrari Grand Prix tunes is the same as a tune from James Bond Jnr. OK, fine, it's the same. Exactly the same. What can I say? I was stuck for a tune, I was up against time and I wasn't getting paid much. What would you do? Besides which, it was a good tune. :) Oh before I forget, big thanks to Sean W (B00daW) for organising an IRC Q&A; session over on #nesdev. I had tons of fun and met some top people. You can read an edited version of the session over on True Chip Till Death And also big thanks to Loopy (author of ASM6, the 6502 assembler that I've been using to code Nijuu). He was kind enough to take on my comments about changing a few functions of ASM6 and I can't wait to get my hands on the updated version as I'm waiting to start optimising Nijuu. Anyway, the music. Track 1 - Title Music One of my favourites of all my NES tunes. I still love the breakdown in the middle even today. I'm going to record a version of this with proper instruments one day. Track 2 Obscure reference : I remember trying to figure a way to do flute-type effects as I listened to Ozric Tentacles' "Strangitude" and "Sploosh" a lot during this time. The wobbly effect on voice B was my attempt to mimic some of that weird flute stuff that they were fond of. Track 9 Yes, this is the track that I lifted from James Bond Jnr. :)
The Jungle Book (NES)
We're coming towards the end of my NES music 'nesography' and I had a decision to make as to which game to do next. I'll explain. By the end of 1992, Eurocom had expanded and diversified and we started working on Gameboy, Master System, PC & 3D0. We were approached by Virgin Interactive who had a Jungle Book game in development on Genesis/Megadrive but things weren't going well and they were looking for an external team to take over the project and get it finished. Not having much to lose and because we saw it as a good opportunity to springboard onto the then new 16-bit platforms (Genesis/Megadrive and SNES - although we didn't actually do the SNES version of this game) we jumped in with both feet. On the back of successfully finishing the project we had a 16-bit feather in our caps and were able to expand the company and move forward. It was a turning point for Eurocom - a real make-or-break moment. I didn't get to do the audio for the Genesis/Megadrive version because it had already been done. However, we were also asked by Virgin if we could produce 8-bit versions of the game too so out came the NES and Gameboy tools again. Actually, that reminds me - Gameboy. I recently read about the .GBS file format and then was disappointed to find that none of the Gameboy projects I worked on seem to be available, as GBS files. If anyone has them or the ability to rip the music please email me. I'm looking for "Lethal Weapon 3", "Rodland" and "Jungle Book". Sorry, back to the story. As I said, I had a decision to make about which game to list next. Though Jungle Book was the very last NES game I wrote music for, there are two more projects I did before then that didn't get released (one of which most of you know about, the other nobody does). So, instead of following on chronologically, I decided that I'd get Jungle Book out of the way first, leaving the two unreleased games to finish out the list. So here we are: Jungle Book. Let me tell you, I had a massive amount of fun doing this game. It was the first time I'd actually transcribed (if that's the correct term) anyone else's music and what better tunes than the fabulous songs of the Sherman Brothers (and Terry Gilkyson of course). Looking back I'm sure we ever discussed the legalities of copying several of the tunes/songs from the film but how could you not? I wished I'd had more time to work on the game as transcribing the songs took a long time but also gave me a lot of material I could've worked into more tunes. I did get to do a lazy reggae-style Bare Necessities though so not all was lost :) Anyway, the music. Track 1 "The Bare Necessities", brilliant, brilliant song. The original version wasn't bad either. :) I put a huge amount of effort into the arpeggio chords for this song. I wanted to mimic strumming somehow so I could capture that ragtime banjo sound of the original track. If you think about how you strum chords, you've got upwards and downwards strumming and so I had the idea of not only working out the arpeggios to match the chords but to have upwards and downwards versions of them by reversing the order for the upstroke versions and also backing off the Attack amplitude. As you can imagine, putting together the subsequent sequence data was a nightmare! :) I think it turned out really well and it's one of those things that you don't really notice until you hear the version with just straight arpeggios. Track 2 Another song from the film, "Colonel Hathi's March". Track 3 And another. This was taken from the opening credits music, I'm not sure of the title as it doesn't seem to appear on any OST album that I've seen. Track 4 I got the idea for this one from the film but for the life of me I can't remember where. Track 5 Bare Necessities in a laid-back reggae style :) Track 9 "I Wanna Be Like You". Iconic song from the film performed by the late, great Louis Prima who was also the voice of King Louie in the film. In the game, the tune was used for the fight with King Louie but preceding that you had to make your way up the incredibly hard falling platforms. We used a loop of the backing (Track 7) to play during the progression to the top of the level and triggered the full song at the top where you meet Louie.
Dropzone (NES)
Glad you all enjoyed the little NES-ified slice of 80s house/funk and I was honored to be asked by Wizwars over at The Shizz to contribute the track (or a new one, time permitting) to a fund-raising compilation CD. Only too happy to help out a good cause, good luck with the CD. Anyway, to tonight's update. I have to admit that this one was not on the schedule and took me quite by surprise when it popped up in conversation (over on The Shizz, again). I honestly thought that this game never actually made it onto the shop shelves and similarly it doesn't appear in the list of past titles on Eurocom's website. I can only imagine that it's due to an administrative error (there's a tiny part of my mind that is also hoping that's there's not an embarrassing/awkward story behind it's omission!). Eurocom also did a SNES version of the same game. Dropzone was actually an Archer Maclean game that was originally on the C64 and we were good friends with him, hence him asking us to produce console versions. However, I remember the SNES one quite vividly and unfortunately not for good reasons. When we talked over the audio with Archer, he was quite insistent that he wanted the music to be an arrangement of "Mars" from Gustav Holst's "The Planets" which, while a little bombastic, fitted the game pretty well. Anyway, I really fancied the challenge of trying to arrange it on the SNES so I got the sheet music and a recording of the piece and put together a pretty faithful (albeit slimmed down and trimmed) version. However, due to what was described as "rights issues" (I'm having to be diplomatic, I believe the truth was a little different), we were told that we were no longer allowed to use the arrangement of "Mars". For reasons I can't remember, we were supplied with an alternative arrangement by the publisher, which only hinted at the original track and was honestly pretty awful. Not really having much choice or time, that is what ended up in the final game. Weirdly, I had that happen a couple of times more, most annoyingly when I composed the soundtrack to "The World Is Not Enough" on the N64. At the last minute, clearance to use anything that resembled the Bond theme was retracted and so the music had to be altered to remove all traces of the famous and ubiquitous four-note phrase and is the reason why we didn't have the Bond Theme in the game at all. Admittedly, this has very little to do with the NES version :) I actually quite like the NES music even though it's nothing more than playing around with arpeggios and comes in under a minute long before it loops. Strangely, and for reasons I can't actually fathom, the NSF that was kindly supplied to me by Bucky O' Hare over on The Shizz, has two versions of the same track, one slower and a slightly different pitch to the other one. Now the obvious reason would be that one version would be PAL and the other NTSC but I had a feature in the old audio engine to cope with PAL/NTSC differences without the need to have two different tracks. I'm only including them both here for completeness. Anyway, the music. Actually, there's nothing much to say about it so in other news, I've been murdering a Famicom AV by applying inappropriate voltage to it. Hopefully it's not terminal :) "Hero Quest" next time. Take it easy. (Edit: apologies on behalf of the spell-checker in Dreamweaver. It thought to replace "Shizz" with "Shnizz"... *shrugs*)
HeroQuest (NES)
Well, here we are: the penultimate entry in my NES music career and strangely, in a way, the one that was probably indirectly responsible for this website's existence. Someone tipped me off to the fact that the music was available on the internet in .NSF format and it was when searching for the file that I found a discussion over on The Shizz where people were compiling their personal Top Ten NES music. I was totally stunned to find that Hero Quest was mentioned several times - thank you! The most surprising aspect was the fact that as far as I knew, back when I wrote the music, the game never saw the light of day. However, I subsequently discovered that the game's author, Chris Shrigley, had released the game into the NES community. As with Ferrari Grand Prix, this project was done while I was freelancing when Eurocom was going through a rather lean period and I owe it to Chris Shrigley for giving me the opportunity. I didn't know a lot about Hero Quest (apart from the fact that it was a board game) and, as I've mentioned before, I only recently saw (and played) the NES version. In other news, Nijuu creeps slowly towards a releasable state. My Famicom is not dead after all so I'm dying to get my hands on my PowerPak now. And...I lost my entire (1500+ albums, 600+ GB of FLAC/MP3 files) music collection to hardware failure. Ouch! Guess what I'll be doing every night for the next few months.... Anyway, the music. Track 1 This seemed to be everyone's favourite of the two main tunes but I actually preferred Track 2 (see Track 2 for reasons why). Two things of significance here: the time signature changes from 4/4 (in the intro) to 6/8 which was a first for me and the faked tempo modulation. I say faked because, well, because it was! I never had a tempo setting in the music driver (and funnily enough I don't have one in Nijuu - though I will do as I've figure out quite a cool way to do it) so the section where the song slows down at the end of the intro I had to do manually by gradually increasing the note lengths to give the impression of ritardando. I think my favourite bit is the third section that uses the arpeggios that alternate between octaves. It's something I came up with in the project-that-nobody-knows-about to try to give a more orchestral feel and I just used the same trick for Hero Quest. I like the way it almost sounds layered, like the higher octave notes are on top of the lower ones. Makes it sound nice and rich though I understand that arpeggios are not liked by everyone :) Track 2 One of my favourite little tricks is in this tune though I don't know if anyone even spotted it. Again, a switch of time signatures for the second section, going from 4/4 to 6/8 but this time I kept the 4/4 backing phrase going while the rest of the tracks switched to 6/8, causing the backing to shift against the other parts (listen from about 1:48) until eventually I switch the backing to a 6/8 version to pull it back in time with the other tracks (about 2:10 when the arpeggio chords come in). Another weird thing about this track is that it doesn't loop. I got myself into a bit of trouble with the second part which I just couldn't figure out how to pull it back around to loop with the beginning section. There was nothing else to do but go for a power ending :) Track 5 From comments I've had, this also seemed to be a popular one. I have to agree, I really like this track. I'd worked out the ballad-y tune and as I was tweaking sounds and adding a bit of interest to the tracks, I though it was missing some really big power-ballad-style drums. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I programmed a really big kick and snare sound (the kick was 7 frames long on the triangle channel!). Still a really good sound even today. I also had a bizarre idea of doing some reverse drum sounds which you can hear in the intro. Literally I just copied the snare sound and reversed the order of the channel settings. Bizarrely it worked though obviously you had to trigger the reverse sound slightly before the beat to get the timing right. I also love the bass sweep at the end of the intro. If you were paying attention, I gave a little nod to this in the first Nijuu demo :) Next time, the NES-project-that-nobody-knew-about!
Erik the Viking (NES)
Apart from a show-reel ROM I did around 1992 which, sadly, I don't think I'll ever see again, we've arrived at the final piece of my NES music puzzle: an unreleased Eurocom game based on the Terry Jone's book/film, "Erik The Viking". It felt wrong not having a picture to accompany this entry so I grabbed a few from the internet. I picked the book cover just because I thought it was a much cooler image than the film poster. In what seems a persistent admission on here, quite how we ended up making a game from this rather obscure film is yet another detail that escapes my memory. However, being loosely based on Norse mythology, the core of the story was rich with ideas for a game and we'd turned it into a Zelda-style RPG - not to be confused with the earlier text adventure from Foundation 9. We were producing the game for the now-defunct Japanese publisher, Video Systems and had pretty much completed the whole game. However, geographical and language problems made the testing and bug-finding phase frustratingly difficult. We were almost solely reliant on the publisher finding bugs/issues simply because there was only 4 of us trying to deliver this fairly large and complicated game and as we didn't speak Japanese and they didn't speak much English, it made for an interesting process. Even I had to get involved in map building and putting together trigger/behaviour scripts for the game's events as well as writing all the music. It was all good fun though and the last version of the game that we submitted to the publisher was in great shape and actually good fun to play! However, things ground to a halt as the shared frustration of trying to communicate bugs and issues led to a breakdown of the relationship with the publisher and we parted ways with the game destined for the scrap-heap. Sad, really, as neither party actually did anything wrong and both sides were enthusiastic about the game until the end. I remember a particularly funny communication from them right at the end that simply said "There are bugs. Please fix them." :) I don't know if Terry Jones even got to see the game, which quite is an odd arrangement (English game developer making a game of an English writer's book via a Japanese publisher...). Somewhere in the world I'm sure it must still exist on a NES dev-cart but apart from that it's "gone the way of the dodo". Luckily for you lot, I still had the music binary files and, with a little manual hex editing, managed to fashion it into a NSF file so even if you can't see the game, you can listen to the music. I am far too good to you all :) Anyway, the music. Track 1, "To The Death" Bucking one of my own apparent trends, for some reason I'd actually named all the tracks in the source code and while a few of them made me cringe a little, I thought I'd include the names as it adds a little insight into the process. I love the arpeggios in this track. As I mentioned in Hero Quest, I'd been experimenting with heavy arpeggio use to make more of a symphonic sound. Combined with a repeating metallic noise pattern I think it gives this track a pretty unique tone. As the name suggests, this track was used in the (very frequent) battle scenes. Track 2, "Peace In The Harbor" The idea of using sound effects in a musical context seems to be something I kept revisiting regularly and here it is again in this track. This has to be a musical first - the sound of seagulls in a song. Aside from this, I pulled quite a nice trick with the lead sound, repeating the pitch bend sound over 3 octaves which gave it quite an ethereal tone. I've no idea where I got the idea from though :) Later in the track I tried to use a 25% duty sound to sound like an oboe which I thought was pretty successful. Track 3, "Spirit Of Adventure See, I can do stuff without resorting to arpeggios! This was the general main tune that was used when Erik and the Vikings were tramping around the villages. I made a lot of effort to make a tune that didn't quickly become annoying as this tune was used quite a lot in the game. It's a lot harder than you might imagine. Track 4, "New Dawn (Erik The Viking Theme)" This has nothing to do with the film itself, I think I was just being a bit self-indulgent :) OK here's an admission. I once saw a documentary about the work of old film composers, the likes of Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann etc. I'm pretty sure it was Bernard Herrmann who said that a common trick he used when coming up with themes for his scores was to use the meter of the words in the title of the film. This idea stuck with me for years and I always wanted to have a go. This track was my attempt do that. If you listen to the melody - da da da daaaaa daaaaa - it follows the meter of E-rik the Vi-king. Strange but true. Track 5, "Days Of Ocean Blue Sound of the sea again. This tune was used when the Vikings first set sail from their homeland. Track 6, "Labyrinth" Another track done in a similar "orchestral" style to the first track. Track 7, 14 and 15 The inevitable fanfares and jingles. Track 8, "Village Life" Another general adventuring tune and once more not a fast arpeggio in sight! Track 9, "Caves" One of my favourite NES tracks. I started off trying to capture the sparseness of the themes used in Mario (3) for the levels inside castles/caves but then added my own twists using arpeggio swells and the noise channel to make a triangle-esque percussive sound. Unusually this track also has two bass lines. At the same time! Track 10, "Dragon Dance" Quirky little track, the reason for the title totally escapes me. Track 11, "Consequences" Pretty much stolen from Track 2 of Ferrari Grand Prix but slowed down to half speed and removing the drums seemed to give it a totally different feeling. Track 12, "Land Of Sorrow" In the game there's a pretty catastrophic event that you unwittingly commit that plunges a once peaceful land into tragedy. This was the idea I had for the music to accompany that section, though it's not finished. It's actually a minor-key version of Track 3. Track 13, "Giant's Harp (Peace Restored) And subsequently you make amends for the bad deed and restore peace and joy to the land. Quite what it has to do with a Giant's Harp I can't remember. This is a major-key version of the minor-key version of Track 3.
--Doommaster1994 (talk) 09:21, 14 July 2022 (EDT)
