Chris Abbott

Born in 1970, he had been a fan of electronics since his first Pong machine, and a fan of electronic music since the days of Moogs on the BBC2 Test Card. The first game music that thrilled him was the death march from the 1970s game “Boot Hill”. He fell in love again with computer game music in 1983 when he got his first Atari 400 computer and was stunned to hear “Preppie” and “Shamus”.

Subsequently he discovered the classical work being done in 8-Bits by games such as “China Miner”, “Revenge of the Mutant

Camels”, “Hovver Bovver” and more. It cemented the link in his mind between classical music and chipmusic.

“When I first heard Paul Norman’s iconic Forbidden Forest and Aztec Challenge in 1984, I knew that this music had been meant for orchestra... and soon, Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway and Ben Daglish entered into the VGM arena to provide more fuel for my hungry musical brain.

They were the best musicians in the world at the time, with a huge fan-base who would buy the games for their music. Being only three voices, chipmusic was by its nature incomplete and ambiguous (unlike fully formed pop records), which meant that listeners created their own interpretation in their mind: giving them a feeling of part-ownership.

Inspired by the musicians and the coverage they got in magazines like Zzap!64, I had a short-term brush with commercial VGM during my A-levels when I did the music for the BBC Master Compact edition of “By Fair Means or Foul” for Superior Software.

In 1994 I picked up a Creative Labs AWE32 soundcard and recreated Rob’s iconic “Action Biker” from memory in General MIDI. A year later, the website that became C64Audio.com had 10-20 MIDI versions of C64 tunes, which were very gratefully received, especially for fans who had lost touch with the original tunes.” - Chris Abbott

From this was launched a quest that resulted in a huge number of live events, albums, concerts, and ever-more-ambitious successful Kickstarters culminating in 80-piece orchestra recordings.

However, his love of the technical aspects of sound and music never left, so he decided to write about sound chips, composers, and code. This is ongoing!