Chiptune is a style of electronic music made using the programmable sound generator (PSG) sound chips or synthesizers in vintage arcade machines, computers and video game consoles. The term is commonly used to refer to tracker format music using extremely basic and small samples that an old computer or console could produce, as well as music that combines PSG sounds with modern musical styles. It has been described as "an interpretation of many genres" since any existing song can be arranged in a chiptune style defined more by choice of instrument and timbre than specific style elements.
A crack intro, also known as a cracktro, loader, or just intro, is a small introduction sequence added to cracked software. It aims to inform the user which "cracking crew" or individual cracker removed the software's copy protection and distributed the crack.
Andreas Jochen Hippel is a musician from Kirchheimbolanden in southwest Germany. He played one of the most prominent roles in computer music during the 16-bit microcomputer era, composing hundreds of tunes for games and demos. He was also an experienced Amiga programmer and ported many of Thalion Software's Atari ST titles. He no longer composes music for a living and in 2006 he was working in logistics.
A music tracker is a type of music sequencer software for creating music. The music is represented as discrete musical notes positioned in several channels at chronological positions on a vertical timeline. A music tracker's user interface is traditionally number based. Notes, parameter changes, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits. Separate patterns have independent timelines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated patterns.
Dizzy is a series of video games, created by the Oliver Twins and published by Codemasters. It was one of the most successful British video game franchises of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Originally created for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC, the series appeared on multiple home computer and video game console formats, with over a dozen games being published between 1987 and 1992.
David Whittaker is an English video game composer. He is known for writing video game music in most of the 1980s and early 1990s for different formats.
Gustaf Grefberg is a Swedish musician. As part of the demoscene, he is known under the artist name Lizardking, and much of his production is tracker music. He is or has been a member of the demo groups Alcatraz, The Silents, Razor 1911, The Black Lotus and Triton. He and Joakim Falk invented a musical style called Doskpop and he released various music disks such as "Doskpop The Compilation" or "Memorial Songs 1+2" which feature many tracks in this style. He also took part in projects such as Merregnon and the Symphonic Game Music Concert-series in Leipzig, Germany.
Melon Dezign was an Amiga demoscene group founded in Denmark on October 21, 1991, by Seen and Paleface. Originally, they were a subgroup of Crystal, where they at first created intros for cracked games exclusively. Shortly after the formation, they were joined by Bannasoft. After helping organise The Party, a demo event with more than 1200 attendees, several other members joined, including Walt, Mack, Performer, Audiomonster in France, Mikael and Benjamin in Norway, and Mark Knight, otherwise known as TDK in the UK.
Rob Hubbard is a British composer best known for his musical and programming work for microcomputers of the 1980s, such as the Commodore 64.
Peter Hajba, also known by his demoscene nickname Skaven, is a Finnish electronic musician, video game composer and graphic artist. His most recent project is with Remedy Entertainment as an animator, sound designer and graphic artist. Prior to working with Remedy, Hajba has been credited on games developed by 3D Realms, PopCap Games, Introversion Software Limited, Epic Games, and Housemarque.
Paperboy is an arcade action game developed and published by Atari Games, and released in 1985. The player takes the role of a paperboy who delivers a fictional newspaper called The Daily Sun along a street on his bicycle. The arcade version of the game featured bike handlebars as the controller.
Module file is a family of music file formats originating from the MOD file format on Amiga systems used in the late 1980s. Those who produce these files and listen to them form the worldwide MOD scene, a part of the demoscene subculture.
Bjørn Arild Lynne is a Norwegian sound engineer and music composer, now living and working in Stavern, Norway. He was also known as a tracker music composer under the name "Dr. Awesome" in the demoscene in the 1980s and 1990s when he released tunes in MOD format and made music for Amiga games.
Jesper Kyd Jakobson is a Danish composer and sound designer who has worked on various video game, television, and film projects. He has composed soundtracks for the Hitman series, Assassin's Creed series, Borderlands series, Darksiders II and State of Decay, among many others. His scores use orchestra, choir, acoustic manipulations and electronic soundscapes.
Tim Wright, known professionally as Cold Storage, is a Welsh video game music composer most known for his work in video game soundtracks such as Shadow of the Beast II, Agony, Lemmings, Wipeout and Colony Wars.
The Ultimate Soundtracker, or Soundtracker for short, is a music tracker program for the Amiga. It is the creation of Karsten Obarski, a German software developer and composer at EAS, a video game development company.
The 2007 dance-pop song "Do It" performed by Canadian singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado features elements sampled from "Acidjazzed Evening", a chiptune-style track composed by the Finnish demoscene artist Janne Suni. This was considered plagiarism by some. Timbaland, "Do It"'s producer, admitted to sampling Suni's work, but did not believe his usage constituted "stealing", calling the allegations "ridiculous". Although users had noted the similarities between the two tracks on Finnish demoscene forums in July 2006, the Timbaland plagiarism controversy attracted mainstream attention in January 2007, when Internet users posted videos to YouTube alleging Timbaland had plagiarized Suni's work. Soon afterwards, the controversy attracted the attention of the Finnish news portal eDome, and the MTV and Rolling Stone websites, who all published articles detailing the events of the controversy. "Do It" was released as the fifth North American single from Loose on July 24, 2007.
Bitpop is a type of electronic music and subgenre of chiptune music, where at least part of the music is made using the sound chips of old 8-bit computers and video game consoles.
Matthew Simmonds, also known as 4mat or 4-Mat, is an English electronic musician, sound designer, and video game composer best known for his chiptunes written in tracker software. He began his career in the demoscene of the early 1990s composing on the Amiga.
Aleksi Eeben, born Antti Aleksi Mikkonen, is a Finnish composer, sound designer, musician and programmer. He is best known for his musical contributions to the demoscene under the alias Heatbeat, where he has composed hundreds of modules using music tracker software and developed his own tools. He has also composed for video games, and was employed as a sound designer at Nokia between 2002 and 2015, creating many ringtones and sounds. His brother is Konsta Mikkonen, also a demoscene musician and dance producer known under the alias Muffler.
