Interview
Name:
Rob Hubbard
Old C64 and early Amiga days where truely wonderful and I must admit that I had a great time writing music and programming.
Background Info: Year 1982 in England.
I bought a C64 to try to learn a little bit about computers and BASIC. I bought the C64 because of the 64K ram and SID chip. In England the other choice was a Spectrum or the Memotech (which no one bought).
I started to write some Educational music software for the C64 which I thought was a good idea. I showed it to some schools who thought it was great but would rather buy books than software. I then decided to get into games, and wrote a game that was never published. People said the music and sound was great but the game was junk, so I decided to just do the audio. Eventually I started to do Thing on a Spring and Action Biker. After Monty came out I started to get lots of work.
I stopped doing C64 and Amiga stuff when the software companies stopped. Hardware and software advances and you have to change or get left behind. It is really tough to keep up with technology these days as things move very quickly.
In the mid 80's many people used to send me their demo's - they used to take great pride in ripping out the music and making a demo before the game was available in the store. People used to pirate and steal software from the duplication plants. As a result I had stacks of demo disks with my music ripped out and scrolling messages. I used to get a lot of phone calls and letters asking some very strange questions - "how do you do scrolling ?", "how do you get all those music voices ?", etc. etc.
For the past 8 years ( yikes !) I have worked for EA in the USA still doing audio related and product development work. I have stopped writing music and focus more on the technical side of things. I use both Macs and PC's. At home I have a Pentium 90. In my spare time I play the piano (I have played all my life and started when I was 7 years old). I have a house and am married so that takes up most of the rest of my time.
I have always been involved writing and studying music and sometime in the future I probably will write some more serious pieces.
What is the meaning of life ? I dunno you tell me. (Tango dancing! -Ed)