UK · Born 1966 · Composer / Programmer
Martin Galway was one of the most technically innovative SID chip composers of the Commodore 64 era, creating the soundtracks for Arkanoid, Rambo, Miami Vice, and Time Crystal using programming techniques that pushed the hardware beyond its intended limits.
Martin Galway was a teenage programmer in Manchester when he began writing music for Ocean Software in 1985. Like Rob Hubbard, Galway worked directly with the SID chip's registers rather than through higher-level music tools, and his programming background allowed him to implement techniques that most composers could not execute. His most celebrated technical achievement was playing digitised samples through the SID chip, heard in his Arkanoid music (1987) — something the chip was never designed to do. His Wizball (1987) score is regarded as one of the finest on the machine. The Ocean loading screen music — a brief piece that played while C64 games loaded from cassette — became culturally iconic in the British gaming community because players heard it hundreds of times during the lengthy loading process and it was consistently worth hearing. Galway later moved to the United States, where he worked on game audio at Origin Systems and Digital Anvil, making his C64 catalogue a contained body of work whose technical achievements are still analysed by the SID music community.