VGM Entry 38: Follin’s Ghouls’n Ghosts
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Even as the Sega Genesis was coming into its own and the Super Nintendo was on the verge of release, Tim Follin reappeared to give the “old systems” a final touch of perfection. Though his non-ZX Spectrum works immediately following the 1987 Bionic Commando arrangement were fairly insignificant, he had learned a lot (not to mention ceased to be a teenager). By 1989 he was ready to take on the world, and put to the task of reworking the Ghouls’n Ghosts (Capcom) soundtrack for the Amiga and Commodore 64, he suffered a stroke of genius which few have yet to match.
This is the title theme to Ghouls’n Ghosts for the Amiga, released in 1988. Enjoy it.
Even the tracks which were not originally his took on a whole new life. With all due respect to Tamayo Kawamoto, Tim Follin’s work on the Commodore 64 rendition of “Stage Two” was a drastic improvement. From the very get-go, Kawamoto’s oompa tuba and staccato flute are replaced by a booming four-note bass line and a much smoother flute tone. The song exhibits delicious dynamics, with the flute sounding out loud for the first two seconds and then immediately quieting down to make room for a wavy, ghost-tone main melody line decisively more appropriate for the theme of the game than Kawamoto’s clarinet. Kawamoto’s counterpoint on the repeat isn’t entirely convincing, and after one time through the song transitions. Follin avoids layering the melody entirely, perhaps out of necessity, but the creativity of his additional repeats and the awkward yet delightful added percussion more than compensate. Limited in the number of tracks he could produce, Follin had no hope of replicating the second half of the song on a C64, so after faithfully playing out the lower track he just took off into his own imaginative world, leaving Kawamoto behind altogether from about the 1 minute mark on. Where Kawamoto’s entire song loops at 54 seconds, Follin’s is extended to a two and a half minutes and doesn’t loop at all, fading out as a completed piece before starting over.
The music to Level 5 on the Commodore 64 is another Follin original, and it kicks off with enough amplifier worship to make Sunn O))) proud. Unlike pretty much all of his previous works, Follin’s original tracks in Ghouls’n Ghosts exhibit a sense of awareness of the game itself. He wasn’t about to let the needs of the game hold him back, but he was for once shaping his music around an appropriate theme. Follin maintains the relativity until 1:18, at which point we’re suddenly treated to an Emerson Lake & Palmer progressive rockout. The soft distortion in the background of the whistle starting at 1:58 is just brilliant, if by now completely out of touch with the game. It briefly reminds me of foggy seaside songs like Jeremy Soule’s “Pirates of Crustacia” (Secret of Evermore, Square, 1995).
Make what you will of the “End Theme” track which follows. It’s nothing to brag about, but it’s part of the package. I think the “Hi-Score” tune wrapping up the video more than compensates.
So there’s perhaps your first encounter with Tim Follin outside of the ZX Spectrum. He’s by no means forgotten, but not overwhelmingly famous either. His work on Bionic Commando 1987 made a loud statement, and his ZX Spectrum works stand in a league of their own on the system, but the Commodore 64 and Amiga arrangements of Ghouls’n Ghosts are what really brought him into full form for the first time and cemented his place in history. He would never surpass his accomplishments in 1989, in my opinion, but he would maintain an impressively high standard for many years to come, and he would excel on a more diverse range of systems than most any other composer in the business.
VGM Entry 26: Tim Follin’s noise machine
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In most cases it’s fairly reasonable to think of the ZX Spectrum as a secondary system for game music. It didn’t seem to have the capacity of the Commodore 64, and a lot of the game themes that ended up there were toned down takes on C64 originals, attempting to emulate the SID sound as closely as possible. But the ZX Spectrum did have its own unique if seldom exploited flavor, and over the course of three years one ingenious artist in particular would develop that into a brilliant new chiptune style to rival anything produced for the SID.
Some time in 1985, or perhaps a bit earlier, Mike Follin scored a programming job at Insight Software. Mike passed the soundtrack of what would be his first commercially released game, Subterranean Stryker (Insight, March 1985), down to his musically inclined younger brother Tim, who thereby got his first taste of programming. The result was fairly simple–little more than an amateur doodle–but for a 15 year old kid with no prior programming experience it was a pretty sound start. Insight Software were satisfied enough to keep Tim Follin around, and over the next year he familiarized himself with the sounds of the ZX Spectrum.
What he probably didn’t do was familiarize himself with the sounds of Rob Hubbard. What emerged from Tim Follin’s early experimentation on the ZX Spectrum was a sound all of its own. Agent X (Mastertronic, 1986) was heavily influenced by progressive rock, a feature which would characterize Tim’s work across multiple decades and platforms, but its uniqueness rested on his productive employment of the system’s excessively distorted tones. Rather than viewing the distortion as an obstacle blocking the path to quality arrangements, Tim Follin made it an essential and intrinsic feature of the music.
Agent X didn’t appear out of nowhere. Follin’s sound steadily improved during his short stint with Insight Software, such that on Vectron (late 1985) you can definitely hear a rough draft of things to come. His better works also coincided with his first real job. Follin was hired by developers Software Creations in 1986 (they developed all of the Mastertronic games I’ll be featuring here); he was no longer tailing his brother and composing for spare change. The compositional quality understandably improved in turn.
Tim Follin’s ZX Spectrum sound was unlike anything heard on the Commodore 64. It was a sort of post-rock prog shoegaze madness before any such notion formally existed, meant to be blasted at maximum volume, encasing the listener in a wall of sound. Future Games (Mastertronic, June 1986), my personal favorite on the system, was a far more intelligent piece than Agent X. The way the song slowly builds up into a glitch-beat explosion at 2:06 is a tremendous feat given how little Follin had to work with. The song essentially ends unfinished at 2:31, but I think that can be forgiven in light of what all he accomplished here.
I think a lot of this style is the product of Follin’s own originality, and fairly unprecedented in its day. Certainly outside influence on some of the progressive rock elements is self-evident, and in an interview probably dated to 1999 or 2000, the original of which is now lost, Follin acknowledged that he was exposed to a lot of Genesis, Yes, and Rush growing up. But the shoegazey layer of static and especially the glitch beats are features I don’t start to identify in other musical scenes until some time later. It’s not like he was listening to Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares at home.
Agent X II (Mastertronic, 1987) was a good deal more accessible than most of his previous works, featuring a bluesy groove and plenty of rock and roll soloing, but noise was still the glue that held it all together. I think it’s pretty telling that when Tim Follin programmed the Commodore 64 port sound–Agent X II and Scumball (Mastertronic, 1987) were his first attempts at C64 composition–he wrote an entirely new set of songs. Follin based everything he wrote around the instrument with which he wrote it, and however much other artists were trying to make the ZX Spectrum sound like a C64, these were two different animals.
Chronos (Mastertronic, 1987) is probably his most famous ZX Spectrum theme, and understandably so. Technically, or so I gather from the comments I’ve read, it is his most outstanding effort on the system. I don’t know enough to recognize technical skill in chiptune programming when it slaps me in the face. But I think the music speaks for itself. Tim Follin was to the ZX Spectrum what Rob Hubbard was to the Commodore 64, and it was only his first of many legacies.
VGM Entry 17: A question of authorship (part 3)
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Kinuyo Yamashita and Kazunaka Yamane: two respected video game composers whose main melodies have appeared in both refined, noteworthy form (on the NES) and in rather half-hearted, trashy form (on the MSX and in the arcade respectively.) The lack of well-documented attribution leaves us clueless as to how much of a role either played in this disparity. But at least we can be fairly confident that they wrote the basic melodies of the songs.
In the case of some pretty famous works, even that much information can be difficult to come by.
Take Bionic Commando. Its main theme (calling it the “main theme” might be something of an afterthought; it first appears as the background music for level 2) is an iconic NES classic. But in the span of about a year between 1987 and 1988, Capcom released this game for the arcade, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad CPC, the ZX Spectrum, DOS, and oh yes, the Nintendo. The Nintendo version did have its fair share of differences, both in gameplay and in song selection (perhaps as an undermining of Nintendo’s licensing laws akin to Vampire Killer), but the “Main Theme” faithfully appears in every version.
Here is a collection of some of the song’s variations over the years. You’ll notice that even the early takes were each quite different:
The first track in this mix is the arcade version. You’ll notice the central roll of the drums and the flutey trills, giving the song a distinctly martial feel quite appropriate for the game. It was clearly composed with an orchestra in mind, and could I imagine be preformed live with hardly any alterations.
The second track in the mix is from the Commodore 64 version. Tim Follin is credited with the arrangement, and if you’re at all familiar with his unique and lively approach to video game music, there can be hardly any doubt. The then about 17 year old Follin was determined to make a musical impact, and he certainly did, taking such spirited risks as mixing in the Star Wars theme song and converting an upbeat march into a grimy space groove. Completely inappropriate for the game, it’s certainly sub par to the arcade version, but Follin was fairly new to C64 sound programming at the time, having made his initial mark in the world of the ZX Spectrum. (Follin did use this same version of the song for the ZX Spectrum release, not featured in the compilation video, but considering its drastic departure from his previous Spectrum compositions I have to assume his arrangement was originally intended for the C64.)
The next track, confoundingly labeled “Nintendo Sequel”, “WRONG AMIGA VERSION”, and a bit later “Bionic Commando Rearmed” is in fact the Amiga 500 version. You might think of it as a toned down, slightly safer take on Follin’s C64 version.
The fourth take is the Nintendo version. Whether it should be regarded as a “sequel” or simply a heavily altered port is debatable. Its music in this instance is faithful to the arcade version, ignoring Follin’s spin, but it fails to incorporate a lot of the original’s frills or deliver with nearly the same impact. It is, I would say, by far the weakest of the five, while the original arcade take is the best. (The “Bionic Commando Rearmed” version which follows in this video is obviously a travesty, but it was released in 2008.)
Now tell me: who wrote this song? Do a quick google search, pull your best resources, see what you can come up with. Pretty much every result is going to direct you to either the 2008 remake Bionic Commando Rearmed or the 2009 sequel Bionic Commando (both by Capcom, same publisher as the originals), because their soundtracks were actually released and the latter uses the exact same name. You’ll find a lot of sites that simply list a composer for the 80s versions with no further information, but they can’t all seem to come to an agreement. Something official from the publishers would be nice. The original game manuals contain no credits (I checked), nor do the original games appear to have ending credits, save the NES version, which lists the composer under a pseudonym. So I pulled up the official liner notes of the 2008 and 2009 game soundtracks. Both acknowledge “Main Theme” to be based on the original by Junko Tamiya. A-ha. We have an answer.
But Wikipedia lists Harumi Fujita as the composer of Bionic Commando (arcade, 1987)–providing no source–and Junko Tamiya as the composer of Bionic Commando (NES, 1988)–providing precisely the 2009 liner notes I used as a source. And we know that “Main Theme” appears in the arcade version. You just heard it. The NES version wiki’s subsection on Music states that “The music for the game was created by female videogame music composer Junko Tamiya, who was credited under the pseudonym “Gondamin”. It is very highly praised for its militaristic compositional element. Two songs from the Arcade versions are used in some areas.” This last comment again has no source.
That makes a bit more sense. I picked up copies of both soundtracks, and sure enough, aside from “Main Theme” and “Power Plant”, all of the NES music is original. Junko Tamiya did likely compose sixteen out of its eighteen tracks. The problem is that one of the two she did not compose happens to be her most famous composition!
What to do when a few unsourced claims on Wikipedia get the credits right and Capcom, the people who actually made the game, don’t?
Bionic Commando‘s “Main Theme” is one of the most revered video game songs of the 1980s. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been so concerned about figuring out who originally wrote it. It would certainly appear as though Harumi Fujita wrote it, Junko Tamiya rearranged it for the Nintendo shortly thereafter, and an oversite more then twenty years later lead the company who released it to get the two mixed up. But this is only a best guess. It just goes to reaffirm the dismal state of preservation of even some of the best early video game music.
VGM Entry 05: SID comes to life
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1985 was the year that changed video game music forever, and this transpired primarily through the mediums of the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System. At a glance it can seem a lot easier to discuss the latter, what with Koji Kondo’s classics being performed around the world in symphonies today. The former still lacks a formalized history. Where people will readily make the bold and overpresumptuous claim that Super Mario Bros. revolutionized NES music, or even all game music, you don’t really hear the same claim being made about Monty on the Run. This is good, because neither are entirely true. The main difference I suppose is that Super Mario Bros. was undeniably the most popular game of its day, while you may well have never even heard of Monty on the Run. I don’t know if its priority over other Commodore 64 works stems from greater marketing success in 1985 or from a later acknowledgement that it was probably the best among a whole lot of excellent songs.
Let’s focus on the Commodore 64 first. The C64 sound revolution required a lot of programming innovations. The sort of sounds Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, and the like were able to produce weren’t preset to the click of a button, and they weren’t at all obvious. Hubbard was most certainly the first prolific composer for the system, and a lot of SID programming innovations were his in origin, but to what extent C64 musicians influenced each other at this point in time is hard to say.
Monty on the Run (Gremlin Graphics, 1985) is probably Rob Hubbard’s most famous work, granted it was one of many he composed in 1985, and the improvement here over C64 examples from previous years is certainly staggering. I mean, games like 3D Skramble in 1983 may serve as fine examples of the SID’s naturally appealing tones, but they certainly don’t predict a chip and roll epic. With Rob Hubbard in 1985, and with Monty on the Run as the hallmark, we can really mark the end of serious technological limitations for home gaming sound. Programming sound for the Commodore 64 was a painstaking process no doubt, but its sound capacity was not so limiting as to physically deny quality in anything but the obscure/avantgarde. It took sound programmers a while to catch on, and perhaps, in light of the fact that they were not previously expected to compose great music for home game systems, it took a while for developers and real musicians to partner up. But three years after the release of the Commodore 64 and its legendary SID chip, home gaming music really came into its own.
Despite both making their first major waves in 1985, western and Japanese sound programming probably developed independently at first. Early game composers tended to stay within their regional spheres of influence. The European movement was not exclusive to the SID, but rather to local systems. Rob Hubbard for instance composed for the ZX Spectrum as well as the Commodore 64 early on, scoring such games as Spellbound (Mastertronic, 1985), but he never really branched out to Japanese gaming mediums. The Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC formed a fairly isolated pocket of platforms. Similarly, Koji Kondo composed exclusively for Nintendo, and Nobuo Uematsu’s non-NES works were all on computers of Japanese origin, such as the PC-8801 and MSX. A few British musicians, notably Tim Follin and Neil Baldwin, would later turn to the Nintendo, but the language barrier proved daunting. Some of Neil Baldwin’s best works were never commercially released due to communication difficulties between British developers and Japanese producers.
The most interesting indicator of what was going on with the Commodore 64 might be “Synth Sample” by Georg Feil. Composed in 1984 or 1985, it was a widely distributed file in the early days of the internet and had no affiliation with any sort of commercial enterprise. No one needed to ‘invent’ game music. It wasn’t discovered; it didn’t come to the first sound programmer as a sort of epiphany. It was the natural result of improvements in sound chips. Once the potential for good music was out there, it would happen with or without support from major game developers. The SID sounded great, it still sounds great, and it was an inspirational instrument in its own right. Hubbard and others might have been lucky enough to be paid a pittance for their works, but I like to think of them as musicians more so than ‘composers’ in the commercial sense.
VGM Entry 04: The dark ages
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One of the final systems to be categorized as “second generation” was Coleco’s ColecoVision, released in 1982. It also happens to be the only second generation system for which I have found an example of good music.
I don’t believe that any music actually appears in the original arcade version of SubRoc-3D (Sega, 1982), but the following year’s ColecoVision port features a wild avant-garde pause screen tune that I really think captures the best second gen technology had to offer. Certainly the ColecoVision had better audio than the Atari 2600 to begin with, but it’s a little easier to imagine a piece like this on other platforms. Who needs a coherent melody anyway? On more advanced systems like the Nintendo, game audio is plagued by attempts to capture musical styles beyond the system’s means. Nobuo Uematsu for instance may be found guilty on such charges, and the scores for the first three Final Fantasy titles really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. What you get with SubRoc-3D is a pretty early example of a sound programmer adapting musical style to the needs of the machine.
But the third generation and its partners in crime did not rise up from the dust and ashes in 1985. The mediums through which the first really great video game music would take shape often originated years before developers, and specifically sound programmers, took notice of them. Just as the Atari 2600, a pop culture icon of the early 80s, was actually released in 1977, gaming as it came to be redefined around 1985 often took place on early 1980s systems. The gap between system release and major game development would not really disappear until the fourth generation. If you look for music in the earliest years of the Commodore 64 for instance, the best you’re going to find–or at least the best I could find–are tunes like that of 3D Skramble (Anirog, 1983). Given what Commodore 64 music would soon become without any improvements in technology, it’s reasonable to wonder whether a few solid early 80s works have been forgotten over time.
A lot of the early to mid-80s systems which would resuscitate the video game industry are a bit obscure. Different systems thrived in different markets, and the North American gamer is not likely to have ever heard of say, the PC-8801 or the MSX, despite their significance in Japan. Let’s take a moment to look at some of the names that will be reoccurring throughout this series of articles. I’m not going to pretend I know much about them, but at least some name recognition will help clarify future events.
The one overwhelming exception to the rule of ho-hum early 80s home gaming music is Ultima III: Exodus, composed by Kenneth W. Arnold and released across a large variety of systems (and thus a large variety of audio formats). I will be returning to it later, but I thought it might provide a nice background piece for the moment.
1977 – Apple II
The Apple II was a home computer designed by Steve Wozniak and released in 1977. (Steve Jobs was little more than a shady businessman exploiting his success as far as I’m concerned, though I don’t know whether Wozniak would agree). As with any system of that era, its sound capacity was very limited, but upgrades were developed over the following years. Sweet Microsystems released their first Apple II soundcard, Sound I, in 1981, and at some point in time between then and 1983 this was upgraded into the Mockingboard A, which used the General Instrument AY-3-8910 Programmable Sound Generator (PSG). Game audio as it actually sounded through the Mockingboard is a little hard to come by these days, but the most important music to utilize the Mockingboard, that of the Ultima series, has been faithfully reconstructed.
1981 – PC-8801
NEC Corporation’s PC-8801 was a computer only released in Japan, and judging by the shear quantity of material created for it I have to imagine it became Japan’s most dominant gaming system. As a musical entity the PC-8801 came to life in 1985, when new models began to incorporate the Yamaha YM2203 FM synthesis chip.
1982 – ZX Spectrum
Britian’s Sinclair Research Ltd. released the ZX Spectrum home computer in April 1982. Musically, the ZX Spectrum would always take second stage to the Commodore 64, but it was sufficiently capable for some significant names in sound programming to work their magic on it. Later ZX Spectrum models would employ the General Instrument AY-3-8910 PSG.
1982 – Commodore 64
Commodore International was founded in Toronto and headquartered in Pennsylvania, but their Commodore 64 found the bulk of its success in Europe. Released in August 1982, it would become the quintessential medium for chiptunes. Its SID chip (Sound Interface Device) continues to define the genre today, and the most famous European sound programmers of the 1980s all had a go at it. Through the SID such figures as Rob Hubbard, Tim Follin, Martin Galway, Chris Hülsbeck, Jeroen Tel, and Neil Baldwin would revolutionize game music.
1982 – FM-7
The FM-7, or Fujitsu Micro 7, was a Japanese home computer equipped with the AY-3-8910 for which little original game material has been brought to my attention. Occasional game port projects for the FM-7 may make for some interesting comparisons.
1983 – MSX
The AY-3-8910 was a prolifically distributed chip, and it found its way into the MSX as well. The MSX was an industry standardization project headed by Kazuhiko Nishi, vice-president of Microsoft’s Japanese branch and director of ASCII. The MSX model found a lot of success outside of the United States, and many early computer games were designed for it. This was followed by the MSX2 in 1985, which switched the audio chip to a Yamaha YM2149 PSG. I am not sure that this should be considered an upgrade though. As I understand it the YM2149 was a replica of the AY-3-8910, produced by Yamaha under license from General Instrument. At any rate, games like Vampire Killer (Konami, 1986) and Final Fantasy (Square, 1987, ported in 1989) would feature it.
1983 – Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
The NES requires little introduction, but it is certainly worth reiterating the fact that it was released in 1983. Super Mario Bros. was not actually a launch title (though it would be in the United States), and it would take two years, and arguably the brilliance of Koji Kondo, to really get the Nintendo game music revolution under way. NES hardware included its own audio design.
1984 – Amstrad CPC
Amstrad was yet another British company to employ the AY-3-8910. Amstrad would go on to purchase the rights to the ZX Spectrum in 1986 and develop new models of that system, so the CPC and later versions of the Spectrum would have a lot of technological overlap.
1985 – Sega Master System (SMS)
Sega showed up late on the scene with their Master System, in part because it was a recovery from the relative failure of the SG-1000, released in 1983. The Master System faired only slightly better. It used the Texas Instruments SN76489A–the same PSG chip appearing in the ColecoVision sampled above.
1985 – Amiga
The Amiga was Commodore’s next generation of home computers, with the original Amiga 1000 designed to be a major upgrade over the Commodore 64 (which dated back to 1982). But much like the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64 came into its prime a few years after its release, and consumers weren’t quite ready to upgrade in 1985. It would be the Amiga 500 version, released in 1987, that became the C64’s rightful heir. Like the C64, the Amiga had its own unique sound chip, called Paula.
Through the Shattered Lens 