Rob Hubbard is one of the most influential video game musicians of all time. Born, 1955 in Kingston upon Hull; England.
While other video game artists were producing bleeps and dings, Rob Hubbard came along as a traditionally trained musician, taught himself programming (assembly language) and changed the field of video game music forever.
Rob Hubbard did all this alone, with just a few Kilobytes of memory and those Kilobytes had to contain not only the musical notation but also the engine that produced the sound waves and indeed the sequencer!
When you listen to what Rob Hubbard created with such a small amount of resource, pure enthusiasm and talent, often producing his tunes over the course of a day or so and being paid practically nothing to do so then you cannot fail to be impressed.
Take for example "Commando", this was a tune that was composed overnight, after a curry with the game developers, adapted and vastly improved from the original arcade version. Hubbard listened to the original arcade tune once and within 8-12 hours had produced an amazing tune, preloaded it on every Commodore 64 in the office, picked up his cheque in the morning and was back on the Train home.
Take a listen to Rob Hubbard's composition of Commando, a great tune, not one of his best IMO, but a fantastic tune to produce in one night with pure enthusiasm.
Rob Hubbard's music marked a paradigm shift in the video game industry, as fans quickly started to buy C64 games SOLELY because Rob Hubbard had composed the music. The rest of the industry noticed but there were only and handful of C64 musicians that came anywhere near Rob Hubbard in terms of tunesmanship and technical knowledge of the C64's sound chip (the SID chip).
At the height of his success, he released an epic 16 minute long tune for the game Knucklebusters which is an amazing tune building up very slowly into a tour de force of programming and musical showmanship.
Take a listen and remember, this was 1986.
And I will finish this introduction to the great man with my personal favourite of Rob Hubbard's tunes, the main theme from Monty on the Run, a frantic, manic celebration of Hubbard's mastery over the hardware, with one of the most amazing segments of video game music I have ever heard (4:48 to 5:50) you can literally hear Hubbard owning the SID chip!
That's all for now folks, I will update this post with more as I have time, but consider this an introduction for those that don't know and a refresher for those that do. Rob Hubbard is the greatest video game composer of all time when you take into account he did EVERYTHING himself:
He created the code to synthesise an Orchestra.
He created the music to inspire a generation of Gamers.
He did this with betwen 3-8KB of memory allocation per game.
He created these tunes for practically no financial reward.
I hope you enjoyed reading and all the best folks, Mantrid.