An Interview with Richard Joseph

Martin Galway is still my favourite even now. Although Rob's was technically groundbreaking there's more emotion in Martin's stuff. Very musical.

Knucklebusters - Rob H
Martin Galway - Wizball (awesome music AND fx. The whole soundtrack is brilliant)

It was an ending section for Antiriad that I decided to change to the piece you hear now. It was abstract and surreal and I felt that the reviewers and gamers alike would hate it. But I still love it. Also, there was a collection of great tunes written for a game called 'Monster Museum' which was never released. Annoying really, I was just starting to get good when the Amiga came along and we all had to change or lose our jobs…..

I hated the fact that the filter was changed a number of times throughout various production runs of the hardware. This meant that we couldn't really use it at all.

I felt honoured. After the 64 I went on to work on very many top titles and I still feel honoured to work on them even now.

It was a very exciting time. We all knew we were doing something special and there was a real concentration of great talent. There were only a few games developers in those days and it was very cool to work for indie houses like Palace and System 3. A lot of very high up names in the current games industry came from those studios originally. Palace was a part of the film company that made Evil Dead and Absolute Beginners so the emphasis was on cinematic games from the start. Palace liked getting publicity and one stunt was to feature Page 3 girl Maria Whitaker as the Princess in Barbarian. I remember the uproar it all created in the tabloids. Brilliant. The Barbarian himself was of course a yet to be discovered Wolf out of Gladiators.

It was the flagship format for the first game I did for Palace, Cauldron II. Out of the three we working on- Spectrum and Amstrad being the others- the C64 was by far the best to originate a soundtrack on. I never used it for anything but games work, but then the games stuff used to take up all of my time anyway.

I had spent many years working in the pop music industry and was writing for mainstream entertainment when I answered an advertisement in Melody Maker (sadly no longer with us) put in by Palace who were looking for a composer to work in games. Nothing unusual about that, but this was 1986 of course and there weren't very many computer musicians around at that time. I'd just spent a year composing about 100 tunes on a Yamaha CX5 music computer (including the 'famous' Robocod one), and had tinkered with a Spectrum so it wasn't that hard to convince Palace.

I’m always interested to hear other people’s interpretations but I don't believe that any of these, or remixes of other's stuff is neccessarily 'better' or 'improved' just because more modern sounds are used. I think ultimately it will be the original c64 renditions that go down in history whatever remixes exist.

Well they all have to some degree. I just like the fact that people are enjoying doing them, although I do wonder why- my own stuff doesn't exactly fit into the mainstream of remixable soundtracks being largely orchestral.

I only had a short time to do Cauldron II. There is a longer version but sadly it didn’t get finished quickly enough to make it to the game. I had just two weeks from booting up the c64 for the first time to delivering a finished tune and 20 sound effects.

Antiriad was the second soundtrack after Cauldron II. I took the tune from something I'd written a year or so earlier on midi instruments and stuck a new bit on the end. As I said in another answer there was an alternative part B for Antiriad that never made it, and I still listen to it to this day and wonder what might have been.

Defender Of The Crown was more remote for me, as Cinemaware who developed it were based in the States. It was weird working that way but I really enjoyed it- the game itself is brilliant fun.

• Spectrum
• Amstrad 464
• Amiga
• Atari ST
• Sega Megadrive
• SNES
• Gameboy
• GBC
• Playstation
• Playstation 2
• N64
• PC

Favourite was Amiga. Bitmap Brothers, Sensible Software, those were cool times.

Least favourite was Megadrive. One of the most interesting moments was listening to Rob Hubbard's Megadrive conversion of my Robocod tunes!

I am more involved with the production of a game’s audio. There is so much material needed nowadays that I prefer to leave the specialized work, like writing Orchestral music for instance to experts in those particular fields. I did write 11 tunes for a Lego game last year but as a rule I don’t write as much. Probably more for myself in fact.

I've been working on an orchestral arrangement of Barbarian in the style of Ennio Morriconi, which is what I had aimed for in the c64 version, and its turned out very well. If all goes well it could appear on a future Back In Time CD.

We do everything audio for games. We compose and record music, both linear and interactive. We design and implement sound effects. We do dialogue production, recording and processing. It sounds like a big industry but its not really. Its just the same as it was in c64 days but on a larger scale. If anything there was more pressure in those days, as every single sound was critical. These days we have the luxury of being able to use sampled sounds which makes the job an absolute doddle compared to the old times.

Probably Rob's Knucklebusters. The tune maintains the listeners interest for what, thirteen minutes? That's no mean achievement.

The day I booted it up for the first time, after bringing it back from Palace, and playing Beach Head and Impossible Mission with my girlfriend's kids (work it out…. yes I am very old!).

The latest project is Republic: The Revolution for Elixir Studios. The sound has lots to do including conveying the various atmospheres of a city at different times of day and night, with ever-changing orchestral /industrial film music to suit each action within the game.

This actually was quite a problem for me, with the SID only having very limited resources for recreating real instruments. Most of the early games I worked on needed the kind of ambitious soundtrack we are creating now.

I went freelance and signed up to do games for The Bitmap Brothers, Sensible Software and Millennium. In 1995 I formed Audio Interactive and we picked up companies like Sony and EA. Last year we won a BAFTA Interactive award for best sound on Theme Park World. Another of our soundtracks, Codemasters' Cannon Fodder (GBC) was nominated for the same award.

For the early stuff - not only the c64 but the Amiga soundtracks I did for Sensible and the Bitmaps. Nowadays I would say that Theme Park World is probably the best but I have higher hopes for Republic…

Yes, the Barbarian thing. Otherwise no, I like them the way they are.

I don't think anything was an inspiration for DOTC. Palace just told me that another company wanted to use me and that there was some tie-in for them. In a lot of ways it was good to work on something, for a change, that wasn't 'Palace' in feel.

I have no idea to be honest. There is a whole CD of music and mayhem from the ill-fated Sensible game Sex n Drugs n Rock n Roll that we are trying to place with a record company right now. It's quite wonderful really! I just don't want it put out as an mp3 yet- we must have spent nearly six years on it from start to finish and I want to get something out of it. As for the future, Jon Hare (ex Sensible) and I are creating a sequel to the SDRR CD but there is little pressure on us to complete it and neither of us have much time. If SDRR was a success then things would be different obviously.

I would like to say that it's brilliant that there's a community at all. After the c64 disappeared into commercial history and the industry was pushing forward I just thought that everyone’s pioneering work would simply be forgotten. Not so! The appreciation of retro games and the people who made them is wonderful, as is the continued use of the machine and emulators, with remixes and CDs… wonderful.