Link Drop: Rob Hubbard - Sanxion

What made Rob Hubbard a game-changer in the world of Commodore 64 music?

Rob Hubbard is generally revered as a demigod when it comes to chiptune music: specifically, his ability to coax miracles out of the Commodore 64’s SID chip. To put what he did into some kind of perspective, we first need to understand what the music in an average C64 game sounded like in the early 1980s.

Here’s a video of Hunchback, a reasonably popular C64 port of an arcade game from 1983, programmer/musician unknown:

A simplistic rendition of Teddy Bear’s Picnic. Not the worst computerized tune in the world, even if its relevance to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame may be a little suss, but the bland, monophonic square waves are pretty typical of “computer music” from this time.

And then along comes Rob Hubbard and gives us something like this:

To be fair, many of the early C64 programmers were unlikely to have been musicians too, so they did what they could by transcribing fairly simplistic sequences of notes from established (and hopefully public domain) songs.

Rob Hubbard, on the other hand, was a musician first and foremost, but he also taught himself the necessary machine code to harness the power of the C64’s SID chip more directly.

I’ll write a more detailed retrospective of Rob Hubbard’s work some other time, so consider this a brief introduction to tide you over.