-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Ben Daglish, legendary Commodore 64 composer, has died
- Thread starter Pixel Grotto
- Start date
OP
OP
I can offer some insight, perhaps. I suspect that despite being the OP I am actually younger than many people commenting here, because I was born in '88 and didn't grow up with the Commodore 64. My brother and I had an NES and an old IBM PC, and those were my game playing machines as a kid. We actually had the PC version of The Last Ninja, which replaced all of Ben's tunes with this ear-hurting stuff:
Around 2015 I began getting into retro computing and started searching for The Last Ninja on the internet, since it was the hardest out of the small collection of PC games that my brother and I enjoyed as kids. I think we never really made it past the Wastelands (or maybe my bro did once) - the PC controls were even tougher than the Commodore's. But something about the game obviously stuck with me over the years, and in my internet searches I found that everyone kept talking about how marvelous the music was, which confused me since the game as I remembered it barely had any music. Then I learned that I'd played the inferior PC version, so I checked out the Commodore tunes and...was completely blown away. I've always been partial to chiptunes, but this incident led to an investigation into Ben's stuff and a strong appreciation for the C64 in general. I actually went and played through all The Last Ninja games and wrote about them on my blog a while back. My writing here's a bit crap by my standards now, but if you wanna read - The Last Ninja, The Last Ninja 2, The Last Ninja 3
In short, his music is timeless and while it's not mandatory that you were there at the time to appreciate it when it was new (I certainly wasn't), I envy those of you who were.
Good insight and write ups!
I owned a ZX Spectrum and my cousin owned a C64. I remember I'd be around 13 at the time. We were both totally blown away by Last Ninja and much of that was down to the soundtracks. One of the cool things about the C64 was that it had "Loading music" - different tunes from the main game levels - that would play as the game was loading (it made the 3+ minute wait bearable). Last Ninja had amazing music in both the main levels and the loading screens.
Last Ninja 2 also had a great soundtrack but the first game will always be memorable to me.
Yea he was one of the greats, and the music he made is so good even today. C64 was my first love and a lot of the best games were amazing because of the memorable soundtracks!
Euro C64 music in general seems to be quite polarizing. Some newcomers love that warbling sound, some hate it.
Having grown up (in Canada) with a C64/NES/SMS, I love many soundtracks on all three but the Last Ninja series ranks among the top.
