The Airwolf Main Theme is title song for the television show Airwolf. The song was composed by Sylvester Levay. It was heard when the show first aired on January 22, 1984.
Theme music from Apache Strike game series was probably partially inspired by it.
Games
The following games do not use this song, even though they can be reasonably expected to:
Airwolf (C64)
Eleven and a half bars loop through the entire game. The melody plays on a square wave, the bass on a 63% pulse wave. On the title screen, a classical arpeggio plays on a triangle wave, whereas in-game, it is muted for sound effects. Pressing the SPACE key (sometimes) pauses and resumes the song. It is tuned at 434 Hz and sounds the same on every SID chip.
This arrangement was Mark Cooksey's very first job. The music driver was not yet his. It was already used in Kokotoni Wilf (C64), when Neil Bate was the only 6502 programmer at Elite Systems.
Airwolf (CPC)
Airwolf: Acclaim (NES)
|
Airwolf (NES) |
|
 |
| Arranger |
Unknown |
| Released |
1988-??-?? |
| Length |
0:56 (PAL) / 0:46 (NTSC) |
| BPM |
126 (PAL) / 150 (NTSC) |
| Format |
NSF |
| Loops |
Yes |
|
The song first plays at the title screen, and then at various points in the game, usually during the cutscenes. It is the only song in the entire game.
The song was originally written in the PAL format, as the game was developed in Australia, and as a result, the PAL version sounds much closer to the actual theme than the NES version, which speeds up the music and raises the pitch 1 1/4 steps sharp.
Its arranger is unknown. Neil Brennan, Beam's first known sound designer denied involvement with the game, and the creator of the sound driver, Gregg Barnett, also denied involvement. Though he had no known audio credits with the company, Nigel Spencer may have had something to do with it.
Its source file name is THEME.T, and was written in Music Macro Language using Beam Software's NYNTH sound driver programmed by Gregg Barnett.
Airwolf (FC)
Soundmaster v3.1 (C64)
Two fans of the series arranged the extended theme using their own music editor. When they sold that editor, they included that arrangement under the filename DEMO SONG.
The bass sounds different on every machine because it uses the SID chip's unstable low-pass filter. It was recorded from the editor in VICE 3.9 with C64 PAL and a bias of -150. A recording from C64C PAL may be made.
CrossFire (GEN)
Links
