Rob Hubbard

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Rob Hubbard (born 1956?, Kingston upon Hull, England) is a music composer for several microcomputers of the 1980s, especially the Commodore 64. He was probably the first to push the SID soundchip to its limit, composing powerful and catchy tunes for many games of the time. Rob resents being confused with the unrelated L. Ron Hubbard.

In the late seventies, before scoring games, he was a professional studio musician. He decided to teach himself BASIC and machine code for the Commodore 64.

Writing a few demos and some educational software for learning music, he approached Gremlin Graphics in 1985 (29 years old) with some samples of his work, to attempt to market his software.

Gremlin were more interested in the tunes than the software, though, and he was asked to do Thing on a Spring, a platform game, where the protagonist was a thing on a spring. The theme, a mixture of violins, electric guitars, and amusing basslines, was accepted. His unique talent for writing catchy, yet complex tunes was immediately discovered by Commodore-users everywhere.

Already in his first year in the business, he landed contract after contract, writing and covering themes for blockbusters such as Monty on the Run, Crazy Comets, Master of Magic and Commando, many of which are his most popular.

But Rob did not slow down, he continued, with Ricochet, Thrust, Warhawk, Spellbound, Delta, International Karate, I-Ball, Auf Wiedersehen Monty, etc. In fact, he was so busy, he didn't have time to code an editor, and resorted to transcribing the music from keyboards to pure assembly (like so many others at the time). After writing the machine code, one had to create an interface for the other programmers, and at the same time keep the whole thing at (preferably) less than 10 Kb.

After working for several different companies, he went to America, leaving Newcastle, United Kingdom, to work for Electronic Arts in 1989 as a composer. He was the first person devoted to sound and music at EA, and did everything, as he says: "Music, programming, SFX, PCs, MIDI, Drivers, tools."

Not long after starting at Electronic Arts, Rob was promoted to Audio Technical Director, a more administrative job, involving deciding which technologies to use in the games, and which to develop further.

During the last couple of years, Rob has been short on time, and hasn't been able to compose anything. He did manage contributing a few re-arrangements of his classics to Chris Abbott's Back in Time C64 tribute. The Danish cover-band Press Play on Tape have covered many of his early tunes using a full rock-band arrangement with great success, whilst recently Rob has performed his old music, on piano with the support of violinist madfiddler, at the same event.

In 2005, music from International Karate was performed live by a full orchestra at the third Symphonic Game Music Concert. The event took place in Leipzig, Germany. The arrangement and orchestration of the piece was done by Rob Hubbard himself.

Rob Hubbard left EA in 2002 and returned to England. He has recently resumed playing in a band, and has even revisited his past game music work in concert. Recent composition jobs have included music for mobile phone games. His original SID music can be found from The High Voltage SID Collection.

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