Germany · Born 1968 · Composer, Sound Programmer
Europe's answer to the great Japanese game composers — a German teenager who won a magazine competition, then wrote the Turrican soundtracks and built the music tools that half the Amiga scene ran on.
Chris Hülsbeck's career began with a competition. At seventeen he entered a music contest run by the German Commodore magazine 64'er and took first prize with a composition called "Shades," which led directly to a job in music production at Rainbow Arts. From that start he became the defining voice of European game music, occupying a position on the Commodore 64 and Amiga comparable to the one Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu held in Japan. His two most celebrated bodies of work are The Great Giana Sisters — the notorious Super Mario Bros. imitator whose soundtrack is regarded as one of the finest ever written for the C64 — and, above all, the Turrican series. The Turrican scores, sprawling and melodic and unashamedly epic, are among the most beloved soundtracks of the 16-bit era, and their reputation has only grown; Hülsbeck has since funded orchestral recordings of them through several of the highest-grossing music campaigns ever run on Kickstarter. His contribution was not only compositional but technical, and this is what sets him apart from most of his peers. In 1986 he released SoundMonitor, a music editor for the Commodore 64, and he later created TFMX — "The Final Musicsystem eXtended" — a music replay routine for the Amiga that offered far more musically expressive features than the rival Soundtracker, including logarithmic pitch bends, sound macros, and individual tempos for each track. He was writing the instruments as well as playing them. Across a career spanning more than seventy titles, Hülsbeck built the European counterpart to the Japanese game-music tradition: melodic, ambitious, technically sophisticated, and produced on hardware most Japanese composers never touched. For a generation of players raised on the C64 and Amiga rather than the NES and SNES, his music is the sound of the era.