Villordsutch interviews Dave Rogers…
Back in the 1980’s the British software boom erupted and with it emerged some seriously talented people, from coders and graphic artists to musicians; it’s amongst the latter that Dave Rogers stood out for many a gamer at the end of the 20th Century. Mostly known – at the time – for his work with Hewson, when retrogaming is discussed you can guarantee that Dave’s name will come up in conversation at some point. Villordsutch recently managed to talk with Dave Rogers about starting his career in the computer music industry, his influences, whether he ever thinks about returning to the gaming market and his thoughts on the Chiptune music scene.
Villordsutch: Being a musician and a fan of music in the Liverpool area was it easy for you to take your skills into the gaming industry back in the 1980’s or did you meet any “Are you sure this is a good idea?” resistance from friends and family?
Dave Rogers: Well guitars and music were always in the family, so it was natural when going into programming that I’d go towards the music side of it. No, I don’t remember anyone trying to talk me out of it.
V: Your first tune you wrote was for Flee on the Dragon, a Pac-Man clone; however you’d later go onto compose music games like Cybernoid & Stormlord. Did you have a particular machine that you specifically loved to compose music for due to the way it delivered your final piece?
DR: The Amstrad CPC was always my number one machine. I can’t explain why, I just felt at home with it. I never programmed anything directly on the Spectrum or the Atari ST. For those machines everything was written on the Amstrad and then ported across.
Of course the Amstrad’s sound capabilities were pretty feeble compared to other machines. The sound chip was nowhere near as powerful as the SID chip in the C64, and the built-in speaker was tiny – I think it was about an inch across? – so to get any middle or bass out of it you had to really over-emphasise the lower frequencies. For that reason I think some of the Amstrad tracks can actually sound worse and “unbalanced” when played on the emulators and good speakers. It would be nice if the emulators had an option to hear what an Amstrad actually sounded like, by narrowing the frequency range and mixing it down to Mono. Or maybe someone has already done that?
V: Artists are never truly happy with their work, but how do you feel knowing that out there people can “Name that tune in three” with a Dave Rogers piece of ZX Spectrum music?
DR: Well I’ve actually grown less dissatisfied with some tracks over the years, and I wouldn’t want to change them. But others now sound weak, or don’t really suit the game. The tracks I’m now happy with include Netherworld, Bear A Grudge, Zynaps, Stormlord 1 & 2, and Cybernoid 1 & 2.
I’d like to take this opportunity to explain why the music for Zynaps (Amstrad) sometimes doesn’t sound right on the emulators. It’s because there are versions in circulation that have a sound channel missing – and when you only have three channels to start with that’s a big loss. The reason this happened is because of a memory-saving trick. We were always desperately short of memory, so to save a few bytes I stored some of the data in a temporary area, then before it was over-written it was copied to a working area (I forget the details, it was something to do with the loading sequence). It’s not a problem when the game is run from a cassette or a disc, but when it’s saved as a file for the emulators some of the sound data can be lost. The data pointer for the lost channel will probably be thrashing around through random data, unless it hits a 255 when it will just stop.
Regarding “name that tune in three”, I’m not so sure. Maybe Netherworld could be named in six?
I’m very pleased that my music is still played, and it’s really nice to read comments from people about how it brings back memories for them. I also appreciate that some people have taken the time to improve on the originals by making remixes:
V: When you were creating music on the numerous games on the 80’s and 90’s where there any influences that you would call back to if you were hitting a brick wall? Did you eternally have Jean Michel Jarre on in the background to feed you “hums” and “blips”?
DR: Deeply uncool as this may sound to some people, the main influences were Jethro Tull and Genesis. That’s probably why there are unusual bar numbers in tracks like Cybernoid 2, which goes 5,6,6,8,5,7,7.
Genesis – …and then there were three (1978)V: The gaming music of old is now a massive thing with Chiptune and especially the Chiptune battles. Have you ever taken a listen to some the Chiptune releases to see what the latest generation is doing with the old noises?
DR: Back then, I assumed that as computers improved people would find the sound of the old chips terribly weak, and it would all be forgotten. I’m still surprised at the level of interest.
I’d never heard of “chiptune battles” until you mentioned them, so I had a look. There’s some really amazing stuff being done there.
V: You’re no longer active in the gaming scene now, but with the rebirth of the 8-bit gaming “homages” and the huge indie scene on Steam, PS4 and ID@Xbox have you ever been tempted to announce to the world that your name is once again in the hat?
DR: Nope, can’t see me ever getting back into it.
I still write music at home, but only for myself. Given a free rein I prefer to write peaceful sounding stuff, and sometimes I managed to sneak a bit of that into the old games – in Exolon on the Atari ST for example the music starts off quite energetic, as you would expect for an action game, but then it goes into a slow peaceful part. When I sent the track to Hewson I really expected them to ask for that part to be removed, but they didn’t. The only music they ever asked me to change was Stormlord, which needed a complete rewrite. The first one I sent them was just too weird.
I must give a mention to this French gamer on YouTube who was quite amused by the “sad” part of the music in Exolon 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6xcgKPrHVE
Since the days of games music I’ve only publically released two tracks. These were for a couple of videos I made about our local park (use headphones if poss):
V: Lastly after reading in one interview you were keenly following the growth of AI what did you make of Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina?
DR: Back in those days AI was a geeky thing, but now it’s increasingly being talked about in the mainstream media and by guys like Elon Musk. In some ways it parallels the gaming industry in that it used to be possible for a lone programmer working at home to create a commercial game, but now it takes big teams and enormous resources. Similarly, AI used to be a minority interest but now I think it might become the biggest change the world has ever seen.
Villordsutch and Flickering Myth would like to thank Dave for taking the time out of his day for the interview.
