Rob Hubbard | nl

Rob Hubbard (born 1956, Kingston upon Hull, England) is a music composer for several microcomputers of the 1980s, especially the Commodore 64.

Hubbard went on to write or convert themes for games such as Monty on the Run, Crazy Comets, Master of Magic and Commando. Some of his most famous tunes include also Thrust, Spellbound, Sanxion, Auf Wiedersehen Monty and Ricochet. The game Knucklebusters includes Hubbard's longest tune that is 17 minutes long. The loading music for Sanxion, "Thalamusik" (named after Thalamus, the software house that published the game) still remains a strong favourite among his fans to this day.

After working for several companies, in 1989 he left Newcastle to work for Electronic Arts in America as a composer. He was the first person devoted to sound and music at EA, and did everything from low-level programming to composing. He became Audio Technical Director, a more administrative job, involving deciding which technologies to use in the games, and which to develop further. After the Commodore 64 period he wrote some soundtracks for PC -games and Sega Mega Drive. One of his most famous C64-era compositions is the music featured in the loading sequence of the game Skate or Die, which features samples of electric guitar. Playback of samples was facilitated by exploiting a flaw in the SID sound-synthesizer chip: altering the volume register produced an audible click. Thus altering this register thousands of times per second allowed for a crude form of sample playback.

Hubbard left EA in 2002 and returned to England. He has recently resumed playing in a band, and has even revisited his past game music work in concert. Recent composition jobs have included music for mobile phone games. .