Game Audio Network Guild — Interview with Chris Huelsbeck (2011)
A career-summary interview for the game-audio trade guild; little technique, but Hülsbeck's own one-sentence version of the Soundmonitor story and of his self-taught, tools-first approach.
Key claims#
- "I was very excited when the Commodore C64 was released, since it had a synthesizer sound chip … I learned how to program in assembly language to create my own games, but music was my first love and soon I was cranking out previously unheard sounds from the C64. Later I won a music contest in a magazine and developed the first tracker-like music editor called 'Soundmonitor'." (shades, soundmonitor)
- Then "first contracted, then hired by 'Rainbow Arts', the first big developer out of Germany. Notable titles from that Era are 'Giana Sisters', 'Katakis', 'R-Type' and the 'Turrican' Series"; later KAIKO (Gem'X, Apidya), Tunnel B1, Factor 5 from 1998 (Rogue Squadron), and in 2011 Chris Huelsbeck Productions (ZombieSmash, Star Trek Infinite Space).
- Training: "Aside from a high school equivalent degree, and about 2 years of piano studies, I'm completely self taught. When I started out, programming was everything, so I taught myself assembly language, developed my own tools and even invented my own scripting system for sounds and music." (tfmx)
- Advice: persistence above all; specialise where the talent is; his favourite phase is "when after trying all kinds of different ideas, everything all of a sudden comes into focus, usually about mid-way through the project".
Relevance to the wiki#
Corroborating quotes for chris-huelsbeck, soundmonitor ("the first tracker-like music editor", his phrase) and tfmx (the "scripting system").
Pages touched#
chris-huelsbeck · soundmonitor · tfmx · rainbow-arts · shades