Rob Hubbard - Nemesis the Warlock [C64]

[brewcakes]

few of us nerds know nemesis the c64 game and maybe fewer the comic. could b vice as i know no stats. what was it that inspired u into making musical scores to begin with?

[brewcakes]

there is a good number of remixes. mr. hubbard made a legacy.

[vidura]

Oh man, this is good! I´ll take this over todays crap game soundtracks anytime. Songs like these, they have spirit inside them.

[phoxxlotekk]

4:22 ! :)

[ProducerVDizzleBeatz]

I sampled this for my 8 bit beat tape...It's the song titles "8 Bit Nightmare" on my channel...

[bernatk]

Written by Aliens. No human being can compose such a masterpiece! ^^

[mrsqonk]

Don't forget Tim follin..He is bloody awesome also...

[GamingLibertyRetro]

Great!



[AlarusOne]

Powerful, evocative music as befits the legacy of Nemesis. Great stuff! :)

[Chaanee]

Over two decades later, Rob Hubbards musical alchemy here lifts off.

[vapourmile]

I was going to comment on this tune, having juts blundered into it, only to discover I already did. This time I was gong to say how there's a thread running through this piece combining the ideas of both what a colossal responsibility and what an immense tragedy it is to be a creature that just kills all its life. There's no real good and evil to it, it's just it's purpose. There's also refrain which suggests this isn't such a bad life when you think about it. A truly beautiful piece of music.

[brewcakes]

nostalgia indeed. 1.44 megs of intelligent game play>gigs of megacorp shit any day

[SpearM3064]

@brewcakes Not even 1.44 megs. As I recall, this game took less than half of a Commodore 1541 diskette... which only held 170 kb. That was back in the days when the focus was on gameplay, not on "Ooh, look at what I can do with a $400 video card, 4 gigs of RAM, and 15 gigs of hard drive space." Also, publishers were more willing to experiment with a new franchise instead of throwing out sequel after sequel.

[brewcakes]

@SpearM3064 i don't remember the specs of the c64 tbh. i've increased my nerdliness over the years however. if my beer sodden brain remembers correctly load "nemesis.exe",8,1 eh?

[lrlarue]

sounds a bit like 'prsuasin' by throbbing gristle at times

[lrlarue]

@lrlarue persuasion

[IdiotinGlans]

Note - play this song when you're reading comics about Nemesis, it fits very well.

[carljohansvamp]

Pretty much best song ever....

[FinalGamerJames]

Awwwwwww WOW this is fantastic stuff, I never heard of this! So glad I have now <3

[Chaanee]

Motherf.. this track is almost forgotten and it was actually one of the best electro tracks ever made. This is one of his best tracks and he was the best, the same class as Kraftwerk and Danger.

[nobah]

Holy shit! :O

[mlhki]

Rob Hubbard is legend

[Gorette66]

This song makes me want to go on eBay and buy all the missing parts needed to run my parents' old Commodore 64, just so I this game and others like it.

[AlsatianCousin]

This was one of the few games EVER to score full 10 / 10 / 10 (game, graphics, sound) in a legendary computer magazine Mikrobitti in Finland back in the day of release. Another one I remember reaching that achievement was Bionic Commando.. and Amiga's Cadaver. Oh well, anyways!

[The2realistic]

@AlsatianCousin As I recall, Commodore User had a less enthusiastic review of NTW, but in this case the Finnish magazine came closer to the truth. This game, and its music, is exceptional. 

[Irion]

Best chiptune ever. Funny game but difficult.

I loved it.

[Furetgarcon]

I can not believe the base these old sid chips had... Damn i want to get a c64 to see if could make some chiptune...

[Moleny]

Great Theme, if you like it you should realy give the cover from Reyn Ouwehand a try, he made a beautyful classic music piece out of it.

w w w.remix64.com/track/reyn_ouweh­and/nemesis_the_warlock_live_a­t_the_church/

[Borin81]

@TheJakan limited? if anything C64 music beats anything put into modern games.

it got more soul the whatever Jeremy "i want to make music for the next LOTR movie" Soule can make.

[Laceyman1979]

This tune always gave me shivers of a good kind when I played the game as a kid on the Amstrad, and it still does to this day many many years later.

Many thanks for the upload. :)

[Jauly]

like many other sids, this one is incomplete converted... some drums are missing

[c0lumb037]

Great Hubbard classic, some moments of genius sprinkled throughout

[TitanFind]

Really nice modern remix if you google for

nemesis the warlock o2

...and just follow the links.

Starts off sounding like it's going to be too soft and underplayed, but then kicks it up a gear for a blistering second half. I liked it so much I put it on my iPod!

[TheSmokingUnicorn]

Best. Theme. Ever.

Thanks to this theme, I'm now a Nemesis the Warlock fan.

[osamabinmusic]

and the version of XOR is awesome ...

[admiralandersen]

Love this music!

[Yobotistan]

I won this game in a ZZAP64 competition. I had my name printed in ZZAP and I was a 2000AD/Nemesis enthusiast at the time. You cannot imagine how happy I was to see my name in ZZAP.

[TitanFind]

@Yobotistan

Perhaps it was Julian Rignall himself who selected you as a winner...

[andymission]

Thank You for my commodore 64 when i had one.

Creator and Mother Creator!

and i had one in my dream last night :P

[bustsomecaps]

sick game was so weird when i played it at 10 yrs old...badass sick impossible game tho...lol..good music

[ultrahenk]

Holy hell. I have no idea if the game itself is any good... but this tune alone makes it worth buying. Even almost 25 years on.

[vapourmile]

I admire how this composer would create musical narratives evocative of the games narrative. This piece combines powerfulness, relentlessness and sadness.

[theeltea]

@vapourmile Not to mention this is all driven by the hardware limitations...

[crosboid]

6:00 is one of my fave parts. Awesome final sequence.

[crosboid]

Amazing!! I remember being hugely impressed with this tune when I heard it first time. It's also funny how it sounds so dated now, but I can hear still the amazing composition despite all the SID's limitations. Effing nice one for uploading this in full, unlike that other dickhead who uploaded half the tune...

[lilunderscorejunebug]

I-is that Crow from MST3K on the cover? lol

[HeadmasterAutobot]

They say Last Ninja's palace theme is the most badass SID tune.

Compared to this, I'd say it's got serious competition.

[brewcakes]

whatever ur current profession Mr. Rob Hubbard; this game geezer will always remember ur pimp tune(s)

[brewcakes]

this and the "druid" opening score still stick in my brain for what ever reason after all these years. both perfect as-is. on a side-note, this game was tough as coffin nails.

[manufacturedZ3R0]

Bizarrely 'eraser' by nine inch nails has always reminded me of this. It's unlikely but i wonder if there was ever any influence there from this stuff. I wonder if Reznor was a fan back in the day. Being the synth head he is it wouldn't suprise me.

[manufacturedZ3R0]

2.50....

One of the finest parts of one of the best c64 tunes ever...

Hubbard is a legend :)

[youtubinfool]

loved the comics. i need to check out this game. specially now i've heard the music.

[SnellSchnell]

Ron Hubbard was good at the old 80's computer games music...he did some brill stuff with the Spectrum which despite the poorer graphics and worse sound always seemed to sound better in its later days. Dunno if it was to do with the way a Spectrum could be programmed. It always amazed me what programmers back in the day could squeeze out of a speccy compared to the C64 or Amstrad 464/664

[mrsethcorbin]

Rob Hubbard is a legend!!!!

[Furetgarcon]

What people could do with SID is purely Fucking amazing....

[bub777]

I listened to this on SIDPlayer (iPhone) and it creeped me out; The main reason it does is becaues that warbling sound sounds like a 16-bit effect, instead of an 8-bit one, imo!

Also the character depicted in the featured cover, looks lots like the MDK main character.

[publicanimal]

How can I play .SID files on my PC. I use Windows and Ubuntu and I couldn't quite figure it all out on either OS.

[jobcalabash78]

@publicanimal

Best way to do it is to use SidPlay (version 2 onwards) on Windows.  There is a version for Linux too, but the site seems to be down. I'm sure you'll find something.

[memyselfandeye3]

This is Awesome, brilliance of musicianship and the nostalgia-factor, just great.

[bustsomecaps]

played this game the cover creeped me out and the high sound tata tatata when something came up out of soldiers body hahah. Lol i was 10 years or so...omg so many memories...and the sound tracks at that time...sublime.

[Romagnasuprema]

peyser you are my hero! more than 20 years that i did'nt hear this masterpiece!

[Zwabber69]

Wauw, I loved this game (and musik) when I was 15 :-)

[mulder3035]

They simply dont make tunes like this for video games anymore.

[gaspingduck]

@mulder3035 its sad i know :/

i miss these aswell

[brewt1mer]

wow...im a teenager again!!!!

[The2realistic]

One of the most underrated C64 games, IMO.

[ThePassiveFist]

LOL. Oh man this brings back memories... piling up the dead bodies to get to the next level. sooo cool.

i wonder if i can find the turrican songs on here somewhere...

[Fisren]

You have no idea how long time i have been searching for this, i recorded this onto a tape and was listening to it over and over again, my parents were pulling thier hairs out. Still thinks its a cool tune.

[TESOblivion4]

I like it!

[80Thom80]

Do a youtube search for "sam coupe tetris" and click the top link to hear another version of this song...

[auni418]

så jävla bra.. o nostalgiskt..

[kimcheolho]

I can't believe I found this tune. Is there a remix somewhere?

[KaitainCPS]

@kimcheolho

Search for

Nemesis the warlock o2

That's a pretty nice mix.

[Simpson654]

Rob Hubbard is the best geek alive, he did these songs by poking the bits into a machine nobody could expect to make those sounds.

[Daclaem]

Not a geek imo , just an artist.

[Xallo72]

@Simpson654

The sound chip in the C64 was pretty advanced for it's time... I'd love to have the 'synteziser' based on 4X C64 chips.. I played with it in the store.. but couldn't manage enough money at the time to buy it :(

[SengirNightblade]

This , along with Spellbound are my favourite Rob Hubbard tunes.

Got both tunes on my iPod along with multiple remixes.

[Xallo72]

I never finished the game... but finished listening to the brilliant soundtrack a lot!

[NewsMan580]

2000 AD huh?  lol, kinda funny looking back on that. I loved this game. Spent hours playing it - time better spent outside I'm sure but meh......

[rokus666]

Amazing music !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[XXXjesterXXX]

Rob rules!!!

[djs909]

Rob Hubbard is GOD

[sasfcps]

really dark tune, i love this. one of my favourite game tunes

[sibraa6]

Totally got a cover of it on meh channel (Y)

[thehaircrow]

at 3:00 on it sounds like metroid

[thehaircrow]

fuckign sick

[TheJakan]

Haha, class for digging this up and putting it on here. This was probably one of the best Commodore tunes ever, bearing in mind how limited they where with the range....

[westgoten]

hm, this one's just gotta go DeathMetal in some form or shape, ill fire up the amp and be back in a month or two...

[wangpanga]

I remember this: my copy of this game frequently wouldn't load and plenty of times this music would just play on and on and on while the screen did it's little rainbow flicker thing.

Unfortunately when it did load the game was a bit crap.

[Drittkladden]

Holy SHIT!!! =O

[explod2A03]

This is very cool! My first time hearing this. I noticed that the melody at 1:02 sounds very similar to The Immortal (NES) music. Hubbard must've recycled that line. Sweet. :)

[YouOpaOpa]

It kinda does.

[c64glen]

Nemesis the Warlock was released four years earlier.

[explod2A03]

Er, yeah, I meant he must've reused the idea for The Immortal. ;)

[PsychoticVolts]

Wow! What a great tune! Unbelievable what a skilled musician can get out of 1982 hardware. Pure energy!

[8bitbubsy]

I could loop this forever... Just marvellous!

[SadisticScott]

Awesome theme. The game was pretty sweet too

[HardWarUK]

Commodore 64 - 38k available for the whole game. Maybe, if you were lucky, you got 6k for the music! 6k for a masterpiece like this! Get a C64 or an emulator and download all the great C64 games, because based on what we get now, modern video gaming is coming to an end!

[spearm64]

Actually... if you were programming in pure machine language, you could also use the 8K block under $A000-$BFFF (which was where BASIC was), the 4K block from $C000-$CFFF, and the 8K block from $E000-$FFFF (the Kernal). So you had a lot more than 38K...

[HardWarUK]

Granted there were little areas so machine code programmers with experience could get up to 49-52kb for the game. Sometimes even more as the game would come with it's own smaller,specialist OS and use it instead of the original OS! The largest C64 tune I know was 11k!!! :)

[AlsatianCousin]

Music was programmed into the game after the main code was poked in, and depending on how much was left they really had to go out of their way to make it fit. But you are right about the positions, I think Hubbard was mostly left with 10K at most :)

[freejaytea]

@AlsatianCousin Make that 4 KB and you're right! :-)

[NecroViolator]

I made a MP3 of this song with a more realistic sound, also Pitched a bit slower...

Sounds really awesome on my Stereo...

[c137DeadHead]

Amazing tune. Considering HOW Rob Hubbard created his songs on the C64, it's just incredible. Recommend every fan of his music to do some research about the man himself! Pure genious! :)

[BionicBollocks]

I still remember listening to this track for the first time many moons ago.

I liked it so much I recorded it to tape then that night I sneak out my walkman

and play it over and over again until falling asleep.

I love the CBM-64/128 and all the shit hot classic tracks it allowed many bed room

musicians to produce

[DruQkss]

Holy 8 bit symphony Batman! This is abso-fracking-lutely fantastic :D

[KaitainCPS]

Awesome tune. One of Hubbard's best, alongside One Man AHD, Monty on the Run, Zoids and Master of Magic.

[McLarenMercedes]

I downloaded an excellent remix by I don't know who, but anyway it captured the whole essence of "Nemesis the Warlock"

Great music for driving, exercising or whatever

[ragingherpes]

One of the best tunes from a computer game ever

[Polaris34871]

Thx for sharing !

[PeyserCommodore]

No problem! Glad you like it.