Another Rare Revealed video
Well, this is just lovely. If you’ve been enjoying Rare’s behind-the-scenes videos looking back at its decades of video game development, today’s upload is another treat. Longtime Rare composer David Wise talks about what it was like to make music for games like Battletoads.
“For years and years and years, it was actually quite a technical exercise before you’d even started transcribing the music to fit on the cartridges,” he said.
“There’s no MIDI […] We’d have to work it out on the piano, transcribe it, type it into a subroutine on the computer, assemble it, run it, and it was quite a slow and involved process to get what was really a glorified doorbell coming back out at you.”
And yet, I still cling to songs from that era. There’s always room in my heart for them.
Stick around until the end of the video to hear Wise play piano for a bit. It’s worth it.
