Back in Time Live 2001 Interviews (Feat. Ben Daglish, David Whittaker & Richard Joseph)

Here we have the full uncut interviews with Ben Daglish, David Whittaker and the late Richard Joseph at Back in Time Live Birmingham (2001). The interviews were recorded by the BBC at the BITLive Birmingham event but only short snippets from Ben & David were used in the Midlands Today news item about the event.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• C64
• SID
• Music
• Commodore
• David
• Whittaker
• Ben
• Daglish
• Richard
• Joseph
• Back
• In
• Time
• Live
• Retro
• c64audio

[turricaned]

@Doommaster1994 That'll be interesting - good luck to him!

[Doommaster1994]

@turricaned Actually, I heard from a good friend of his that he is doing music for games again.

[swiv2d]

@turricaned yep it really set the artistic mood for the game, there was more thought gone into it then what was needed that's why to me it's more than just a game sound track it's a very addictive unusual soundtrack, also the one in the second game is also , but you can't beat the original.

[turricaned]

@turricaned Oh, and one other thing, the original Beast had 900k of music data (uncompressed of course) - that was pretty much unheard of in 1989. Where Whittaker scored points for me was that rather than taking the lazy route and stuffing a load of sampled speech in there, he really *thought* about how to make the best of the opportunity Reflections gave him and in doing so set the bar far higher than it had ever been before.

[turricaned]

@swiv2d I dunno - Whittaker's output on the Amiga tended to have the edge over Hubbard's (Hubbard had gone to the US and the Amiga was way down his list of priorities), but Hubbard's C64 work still reigns supreme, closely followed by Jeroen Tel, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish and Whittaker. Tel did some fantastic work on the Amiga too (Mysterious Worlds and Agony's ingame music among others).

[turricaned]

@Doommaster1994 Well, he seems to enjoy the dialogue stuff he's doing now, so ultimately it's his call. More and more these days, games with multi-million dollar budgets will go to big-name composers and Hollywood-grade production houses for their music. The era of the specialist video game composer is coming to an end, if not already over, for mainstream titles at least. Indie game developers and studios are still doing it, but it's not guaranteed income anymore.

[Doommaster1994]

@turricaned I read in an interview what he composes depending on how he's feeling. Like if he is lazy, he said he'll just 'steal' ideas from other songs or he sucks at writing music when he's depressed. It's really too bad he doesn't compose music anymore. He's a very talented and gifted composer.

[turricaned]

@Doommaster1994 I always got the idea that after the first Beast game, David Whittaker's heart wasn't in it anymore (not that I blame him - how do you top that?). That said, his work still stands up today and Tim Wright (who eventually became Psygnosis's in-house music guy and did a fabulous job) admits to copping a lot of Whittaker's ideas initially. I can still hum those tunes from memory, so he had to be doing something right...

[Doommaster1994]

@swiv2d I never was a fan of Whittaker's computer music (Not that it sucks, it doesn't obviously), but the music he did for the NES was phenomenal.

[swiv2d]

i still think David Whittaker is the best of couse they praise rob Hubbard but no one was able to come up with such a great soundtrack like 'Shadow of the Beast'.