Música en los videojuegos: conversación con Adam Gilmore.

Quizás algunos nostálgicos de la vieja escuela recuerden con cariño la "banda sonora" de algunos videojuegos clásicos de la época de los 8 bits. Cómo olvidar aquellas excelentes composiciones realizadas para juegos de computador Atari 800xl y Commodore 64, tales como las canciones de "World Karate Championship", "Boulderdash", "Draconus", "Zybex" y tantas otras. Justamente estos últimos dos videojuegos tienen un denominador común: el gran músico Adam Gilmore.

Adam Gilmore es un compositor inglés que creó piezas musicales para varios juegos durante la década de los 80 y 90, y plasmó su original estilo utilizando los chips de sonido SID y Pokey de aquella época, los cuales contaban con 3 y 4 canales de sonido respectivamente.

Allá por el año 2000 me animé a investigar cómo Adam había podido realizar sus composiciones en aquellas plataformas de 8 bits, por lo que decidí buscarlo a través de la red. Finalmente pude encontrar su dirección de e-mail (hace 9 años era bastante más difícil localizar el e-mail de alguien :) , y le envié un correo con algunas preguntas de mi interés, las cuales se las presento a continuación junto a las respuestas que él me dio:

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Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 04:08:19 PST
From: Adam Gilmore
Subject: Re: Hi!

hi milko,

sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you - i've been very busy developing web sites :)
yeah - the atari stuff was really good to work on - i used to get really good reviews for my atari work as there wasn't many people composing on it. Rob Hubbard's work got me interested in the Atari as it had excellent bass sounds (i'm a bass player)

Here are the answers to your questions...

Q) How did you create the music?

A) I wrote my own player on the C64 (with a lot of help from Jason Whittaker) in 6502 assembler using OPTASM. The music data itself was coded directly into the program using hexadecimal (which was fun:)) - i got quite fast at this in the end. I wrote the music using various keyboards (Casio CZ101 / Kawai K1 / Yamaha RX17 drum machine) then converted it to work on the computer. I had a MIDI sequencer on the C64 (i can't remember it's name tho').I converted my C64 player to run on the Atari (which was quite straightforward) as they both run on a 6502 processor.

Q) Did you work with 'Brian Jobling, Michael Owens and Kevin Franklin' at the design of 'Zybex'?

A) I didn't design it but i did quite a lot of play testing whilst it was in development. I was good friends with the guys at Zeppelin games. I don't keep in touch with them anymore, which is a pity.

Q) do you have a web site?

A) No - but http://www.c64.org/ have a lot of my C64 music on it. I've got all the old 5 1/4 inch disks that i've got to send to Adam L. I keep forgetting to send them and i think he's given up hassling me :)

Anyway, thanks for the interest in my music.

Speak to you soon,
Adam
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De lo que estamos seguros es que la música de Adam Gilmore y de otros grandes, tales como Rob Hubbard y Ben Daglish, siempre será recordada por toda una generación de videojugadores.