Parallax intro is one of those things that you either get or don't and if you do, you understand a bit of my mind and everyone that loves it a little more.
+Starfire Technology What is this? Explain yourself I don't get it. I want to understand, I get the sound is being visualized but I don't know what the meaning of this is.
+Stacy Mitchell What I mean is the music, I would say most people would here this and think just noise, random blips and beeps. To me there is something about the melody, how mathematical it is, so digital yet at the same time so alive and mind expanding. It can literately relax me from an anxious mood, if you get what I mean, how the math, waveshapes and sound all come together in something beautiful, then you get how my mind works just a little bit more then most people. Being able to see the waveforms just brings that all to another level.
+Starfire Technology I get a totally different experience from it. It makes me laugh sometimes when I'm overwhelmed by a sound that puts the hair on my arms up. That feeling when you hear something, a sound or set of sounds, a pitch from a woman or man's voice singing, a violin or in this case, synth. Something in me swells to tears and I laugh when the music does that to me. Not because I think it's ridiculous that I'm overwhelmed by the sound emotionally but I think it's because crying and laughing are very closely connected somehow. My sister cries all the time and in the middle of it, she will just laugh for no reason at all. It's like the calm after the storm. I'm not high I swear.
I once found MG's phone number embedded in a piece of code in some early game or demo - Just got a trilogic expert that christmas - 1984 i think - I rang him and I think 12yo me was a complete idiot in whatever I said, and he just ripped the crap out of me - He wasn't rude, he was having fun and laughing, & I know I was a complete tool - I thought he was more awesome for it! None of my friends believed me. I rang up many others back then too - for some reason people put their phone numbers hidden inside their code back then - Tim & Cory were a couple of others - Would call them regular and they were nothing short of fantastic, Swapping 5.1/4 discs in the post with demos and stuff they had done. Happiest days of my youth. Playing these games and listening to such incredible music - My SID chip was slightly broke but this made it sound even better. Delta/Sanxion/Wizball/Green Beret/Parallax/LastNinja/MegaApocalypse/OceanLoader123 were the soundtrack to my youth.
SquareWaveHeaven I read a really old interview somewhere, where Galway admits he 'painted himself into a corner' and couldn't figure out how to finish the the tune, so just messed around with that belting discordant racket using as many effects, filters and bends as he could.
THE best 8bit work ever made. period. goosebumps every time. All hail to Galway.I used to put the game on just for the music much more than playing it.
Same here, Ladeluff. If memory serves, the game was not terrible - mediocre, perhaps. But utterly eclipsed by its own title screen - hypnotic visuals and THIS work of magnificent art. The time I've spent transfixed is orders of magnitude greater than the time I spent playing the game itself.
No - it's a readout of the product of it. He is not around. You cannot deduce the nature of his former presence or work process from the result. All that may be said is that what you see here is the digital representation of aspects of work of a genious.
@@antihumor2231 Aside from the fact that your comment sounds appropriately like basic programming for C64, I don't think you understood my slightly obtuse comment.
It's amazing how such creative pieces of music were produced on a simple 8 bit computer with a fantastic synth chip.. only to be skipped seconds into it after a 5min load time. I played this game when I was a kid, but I rarely ever listened to the full intro track.
I left my sincere thoughts about c64 music in general at the lightforce youtube vid, but for fucks sake.... This has absolutely have to be one of game's histories most memorable soundtracks ever. If not, the judges are just too young, unexperienced or just too fucking halfwit to know game music history.. This is where it started, period. and this is why we still listen to it.... Bless all of you :)
I remember loading this up for the first time and sitting there transfixed listening to this as the colour bars strobed. It was a religious experience.
I love you for creating and uploading this. Absolutely mindblowing! For me Parallax always was the most epic chiptune and I'd bet Martin Galway did a fair bit of listening to Philipp Glass and Jean Michel Jarre before writing this :)
What a fantastic piece of work! This is made on a machine that is 30 years old which makes it even more wonderful. But from 9:40 onwards, the harmonics that are used are absolutely superb, even down to the last note, a fantastic piece of music, and should be lauded for that.
You know what…all these years ive just regarded the last bit of this track as just noise, random noise and ive finally seen it…i hear it now…pure harmonic genius! Wow!!!
The music is creepy and epic. The last seconds (9:17) of music, i imagine travel in the spacecraft hurtling through hyperspace toward an uncertain course.
Ah, what a great tune. Don't forget the psychodelic visuals that went along with this title tune. This has to be the ultimate companion piece to any "experience" :D .
This theme is so tremendously and wonderfully self-indulgent. I can hear folk, rock ballad, trance, and disturbing dark ambient. This song expresses pride, struggle, imagination, epiphany, loss, perseverance, despair, recovery, grief, a whole range of human emotion. It's hard to believe that it was just title music from a computer game soundtrack.
great acid sounds... I don't know exactly why, but these electronic sounds are so warm... what a nostalgia... and the ending part is so psychedelic... definitely a masterpiece!
Parallax is one of my all time favorite C64 tunes, because of the futuristic, other-worldly feel to it. I really love when things start to pick up at 7:16. It was always fascinating to watch this in its combined waveform or on a spectral analyzer, but I've never seen it shown with all 3 voices playing separately. Awesome to see!
Same here. I liked playing the game, but often I'd load it up just for the music. Same goes for Wizball, Target Renegade, and Nemesis the Warlock. Great tunes all
If only the game was made for this song and not the other way around. Stanley Kubrick built a fitting film for Also Sprach Zarathustra, so I don't see how an epic loader tune did not get the sort of epic game it deserved.
C M maybe one day it will. I’d say the audio technology of the C64 was far ahead of the rest of the computer (and that this music is timeless just as it is). We are only just starting to make the kinds of games people dreamed of, with sophisticated game engines and tools letting artists express themselves, whereas back then the game engine might take up most of the time and energy. By the time such tools were developed for the C64, people were already moving on to the next generation. Hence new consoles come with development tools before they are even released! I know there were some great 8-bit games. But maybe not so many as epic as the music.
@@perfectfutures The c64 still had legs longer than any other generaton combined really . It was form 1982. It was revolutionary for its price point. And had the right mix of hw and sw at the right time
These sounds ! That highly modulated squares and arps in clever interesting layers and changes on a digital sound chip controlled by computer made the c64 feel alive and games felt exciting even if some were crap 😂
Ah, Martin Galway. Undoubtedly the best of the SID musicians in terms of pure composition, his tunes had a flow to them that few could match and, had he been born 300 years earlier, he'd no doubt have been one of the better known classical composers. I respect his abilities enormously, but unfortunately they just don't do it for me. I much preferred the rough and ready stuff that Rob Hubbard created which, whilst not flowing quite so much, were much more enjoyable to me. But that's just one man's opinion.
Ah, leopold, I love this comment, thanks for posting it. I'm a Galway guy, but there's no doubt in my mind that Hubbard also had a remarkable talent for crafting a catchy tune on the good old SID. 👍
I still remember listening to this for the first time back in the 80s, I was already a fan of Galway, but at first I just thought it was weird, I had no idea of how long the buildup of the track was, so it just felt disappointing at first. I love the high score loop even more, is it on UA-cam?
Yeah, the stuff after the buildup is masterful, but I just don’t see the point why he dragged the first bit out so long. I’m new to his work, so I anticipated 11 minutes of the same buildup, haha.
Surprisingly, I suspect, Martin managed somehow to musically express my whole life, from birth till death. It is interesting and sad at the same time... Very strong composition!
Your life must have been very sad then But seriously, that, in a way, is a very good analogy: The song starts off lighthearted, but then tenses, with it seeming that there is no way out of the sadness. Then, at 5:44, all the emotion crushes down upon you, and you realise that there is hope, at 6:45. In your old age, you come to accept your fate, now at 8:18. As your dementia consumes you, your mind and soul falls apart in 9:03. As you slowly die, at 9:21, slowly becoming nothing more than a body of flesh, and hear the heart monitor stop beeping, at 11:09, your life vanishes: it is no more.
@@digmsymii321 I knew you gonna say that because I have done the same in the past (not anymore) ... because it is "nothing burger" shallow "feedback" loop
Let us bow to one of the holy trinity of C64 music gods, that which is Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, and Jeroen Tel. I will make many sacrifices in your honor, holy ones.
I do kind of wonder if the BBC Proms had a Video Games Prom of orchestral arrangements of video game music that included this piece. I can imagine the meme now.. _Mind meltingly awesome orchestral piece_ BBC Narrator: And that was Tim Fallon's composition, "Opening theme tune to Fruit Machine Simulator" originally composed for the Commodre VIC 20 in 1984.
It's 3AM and I have a paper due tomorrow, but instead I'm listening to this.
How you do on the paper?!
@@MEMPHISBUTCHA I forgor 💀It was 2 years ago lol, though considering I'm still alive today I probably did okay on it.
@@TheTomatoWatcher That's awesome lol! Time is funny, sure fly's by!! ⌛
martin deciding to build a table and a chair from scratch at 9:18
Parallax intro is one of those things that you either get or don't and if you do, you understand a bit of my mind and everyone that loves it a little more.
+Starfire Technology What is this? Explain yourself I don't get it. I want to understand, I get the sound is being visualized but I don't know what the meaning of this is.
+Stacy Mitchell What I mean is the music, I would say most people would here this and think just noise, random blips and beeps. To me there is something about the melody, how mathematical it is, so digital yet at the same time so alive and mind expanding. It can literately relax me from an anxious mood, if you get what I mean, how the math, waveshapes and sound all come together in something beautiful, then you get how my mind works just a little bit more then most people. Being able to see the waveforms just brings that all to another level.
+Starfire Technology I get a totally different experience from it. It makes me laugh sometimes when I'm overwhelmed by a sound that puts the hair on my arms up. That feeling when you hear something, a sound or set of sounds, a pitch from a woman or man's voice singing, a violin or in this case, synth. Something in me swells to tears and I laugh when the music does that to me. Not because I think it's ridiculous that I'm overwhelmed by the sound emotionally but I think it's because crying and laughing are very closely connected somehow. My sister cries all the time and in the middle of it, she will just laugh for no reason at all. It's like the calm after the storm. I'm not high I swear.
+Starfire Technology
Whatever drugs you're taking... Send them my way
@@digitalblasphemy1100 - If you get overwhelmed by sounds you just might as well just be sensitive to sound, it's not "ridiculous" at all :3
Still listening in 2024, i will never tire of this for as long as i live ❤️
same
yeaaasss!!
I once found MG's phone number embedded in a piece of code in some early game or demo - Just got a trilogic expert that christmas - 1984 i think - I rang him and I think 12yo me was a complete idiot in whatever I said, and he just ripped the crap out of me - He wasn't rude, he was having fun and laughing, & I know I was a complete tool - I thought he was more awesome for it!
None of my friends believed me. I rang up many others back then too - for some reason people put their phone numbers hidden inside their code back then - Tim & Cory were a couple of others - Would call them regular and they were nothing short of fantastic, Swapping 5.1/4 discs in the post with demos and stuff they had done. Happiest days of my youth. Playing these games and listening to such incredible music - My SID chip was slightly broke but this made it sound even better.
Delta/Sanxion/Wizball/Green Beret/Parallax/LastNinja/MegaApocalypse/OceanLoader123 were the soundtrack to my youth.
one of the best C64 tunes ever, remember when I played it in loop for hours.
it is amazing with my subwoofer here. i may do the same see if the Omnissiah appears.
Dat ending tho. The brain melter. And visualised like that, it kinda looks like parallax. I wonder if that's what he was aiming for.
SquareWaveHeaven I read a really old interview somewhere, where Galway admits he 'painted himself into a corner' and couldn't figure out how to finish the the tune, so just messed around with that belting discordant racket using as many effects, filters and bends as he could.
THE best 8bit work ever made. period. goosebumps every time. All hail to Galway.I used to put the game on just for the music much more than playing it.
Same here, Ladeluff. If memory serves, the game was not terrible - mediocre, perhaps. But utterly eclipsed by its own title screen - hypnotic visuals and THIS work of magnificent art. The time I've spent transfixed is orders of magnitude greater than the time I spent playing the game itself.
Richard Bayliss I like but I hadnt heard these of Galway's
This was beyond goosebumps somehow.
just wow. Truly had the muses with that one.
This is Jarre level.
ps. Tel is a joke.
Wizball - Very strong contender?
What you can see here is a genius at work
No - it's a readout of the product of it. He is not around. You cannot deduce the nature of his former presence or work process from the result. All that may be said is that what you see here is the digital representation of aspects of work of a genious.
deep
@@whynottalklikeapirat Go to 2:32
@@antihumor2231 Aside from the fact that your comment sounds appropriately like basic programming for C64, I don't think you understood my slightly obtuse comment.
what a pretentious twat
It's amazing how such creative pieces of music were produced on a simple 8 bit computer with a fantastic synth chip.. only to be skipped seconds into it after a 5min load time. I played this game when I was a kid, but I rarely ever listened to the full intro track.
8:20 to the end is nuts. Put your headphones on and go into a trance
Yeah, truly. I could say that this entire song just makes me go insane!
I left my sincere thoughts about c64 music in general at the lightforce youtube vid, but for fucks sake....
This has absolutely have to be one of game's histories most memorable soundtracks ever.
If not, the judges are just too young, unexperienced or just too fucking halfwit to know game music history..
This is where it started, period. and this is why we still listen to it.... Bless all of you :)
I remember loading this up for the first time and sitting there transfixed listening to this as the colour bars strobed. It was a religious experience.
And THIS is why I've always thought of Martin Galway as one of the greatest musicians on any keyboard, chip, or synthesizer. Ever.
@Stefan W. Comic Bakery is my favorite song of all time in the history of pretty much anythinng. he is indeed a genius
Ben Daglish also. I think they did work together on a project as well, but he or the one like him was very protective of his music code.
This is one of my favorite tunes on C64, breathless stuff, the tune from 7:16 is just off another planet
yes and now so am I. How have I not heard this? lol
@@jhoughjr1 You should hear Matt Gray's modern remix of this from his Reformation 3 album.
From there? It's "from another planet" from the start.
A triumph of human achievement.
Amazing how much sound he got from only 3 note polyphony. The SID chip still sounds great!
Pretty cool the creativity we took for granted as kids is being recognized.
I don't know why, but I'm still drawn to this Tune after 34ish Years. Well this, last ninja, ocean loads etc etc but mainly this :)
same here.
I love you for creating and uploading this. Absolutely mindblowing! For me Parallax always was the most epic chiptune and I'd bet Martin Galway did a fair bit of listening to Philipp Glass and Jean Michel Jarre before writing this :)
What a fantastic piece of work! This is made on a machine that is 30 years old which makes it even more wonderful. But from 9:40 onwards, the harmonics that are used are absolutely superb, even down to the last note, a fantastic piece of music, and should be lauded for that.
The machine was 30 years old in 2012 :)
You know what…all these years ive just regarded the last bit of this track as just noise, random noise and ive finally seen it…i hear it now…pure harmonic genius! Wow!!!
@ajbreit Wow! What a description! Never thought of that until now! Thanks for putting that out there.
@@retrogamesrevived1189 Speakers help. If i wasnt at my comp but on my phone it would go unnoticed.
Seeing this through Oscilloscope added to its beauty! Incredible!
The music is creepy and epic. The last seconds (9:17) of music, i imagine travel in the spacecraft hurtling through hyperspace toward an uncertain course.
+Maleiva I thought 11:00 was supposed to be the engines stopping and the ship landing.
I was really skeptical until the first minute - I am glad that I did not turn it off, though.
Theres no music like it in the history of mankind
Yes.
9:18
i can almost smell sawdust
the c64 can't cut wood
@@arro140 r/woooosh?
indeed
Hypnotic carpentering! Very trippy!
@@arro140 not if you don’t mod it
Ah, what a great tune. Don't forget the psychodelic visuals that went along with this title tune. This has to be the ultimate companion piece to any "experience" :D .
A man and his SID
2:52 only 2 channels running and still fluid harmony ❤️
This theme is so tremendously and wonderfully self-indulgent. I can hear folk, rock ballad, trance, and disturbing dark ambient. This song expresses pride, struggle, imagination, epiphany, loss, perseverance, despair, recovery, grief, a whole range of human emotion. It's hard to believe that it was just title music from a computer game soundtrack.
great acid sounds... I don't know exactly why, but these electronic sounds are so warm... what a nostalgia... and the ending part is so psychedelic... definitely a masterpiece!
Parallax is one of my all time favorite C64 tunes, because of the futuristic, other-worldly feel to it. I really love when things start to pick up at 7:16. It was always fascinating to watch this in its combined waveform or on a spectral analyzer, but I've never seen it shown with all 3 voices playing separately. Awesome to see!
Thanks to nyanpasu64, he made that program
THIS IS THE FUTURE.
Takes me back to when I was 14. I'd pause the tape to listen :) LOVE IT, thanks for uploading it.
Same here. I liked playing the game, but often I'd load it up just for the music. Same goes for Wizball, Target Renegade, and Nemesis the Warlock. Great tunes all
How nice to see it being appreciated.
thanks very much for making this video its a thing of beauty. when those square waves come into phase its so nice to see it and hear it
What a masterpiece. Great visualisation too, quite educational for a synth noob like myself!
If only the game was made for this song and not the other way around. Stanley Kubrick built a fitting film for Also Sprach Zarathustra, so I don't see how an epic loader tune did not get the sort of epic game it deserved.
C M maybe one day it will. I’d say the audio technology of the C64 was far ahead of the rest of the computer (and that this music is timeless just as it is). We are only just starting to make the kinds of games people dreamed of, with sophisticated game engines and tools letting artists express themselves, whereas back then the game engine might take up most of the time and energy.
By the time such tools were developed for the C64, people were already moving on to the next generation. Hence new consoles come with development tools before they are even released!
I know there were some great 8-bit games. But maybe not so many as epic as the music.
@@perfectfutures The c64 still had legs longer than any other generaton combined really
.
It was form 1982. It was revolutionary for its price point. And had the right mix of hw and sw at the right time
These sounds ! That highly modulated squares and arps in clever interesting layers and changes on a digital sound chip controlled by computer made the c64 feel alive and games felt exciting even if some were crap 😂
9:21 onwards is amazing.
I just saw your sexy thumbnail pic and knew we should be together, making little baby retro joysticks
haha
Ah, Martin Galway. Undoubtedly the best of the SID musicians in terms of pure composition, his tunes had a flow to them that few could match and, had he been born 300 years earlier, he'd no doubt have been one of the better known classical composers. I respect his abilities enormously, but unfortunately they just don't do it for me. I much preferred the rough and ready stuff that Rob Hubbard created which, whilst not flowing quite so much, were much more enjoyable to me. But that's just one man's opinion.
Ah, leopold, I love this comment, thanks for posting it. I'm a Galway guy, but there's no doubt in my mind that Hubbard also had a remarkable talent for crafting a catchy tune on the good old SID. 👍
@@davidwoodcock8042 my love to you and lee xx
I was zoning out while watching this, and noticed that when it all kicks off after 9:20, the top track at times looks like the in-game ship :)
I still remember listening to this for the first time back in the 80s, I was already a fan of Galway, but at first I just thought it was weird, I had no idea of how long the buildup of the track was, so it just felt disappointing at first. I love the high score loop even more, is it on UA-cam?
YES! ua-cam.com/video/qy5s5r3u8mY/v-deo.html
Yeah, the stuff after the buildup is masterful, but I just don’t see the point why he dragged the first bit out so long. I’m new to his work, so I anticipated 11 minutes of the same buildup, haha.
Surprisingly, I suspect, Martin managed somehow to musically express my whole life, from birth till death.
It is interesting and sad at the same time...
Very strong composition!
Oooh, that's deep. I love that interpretation!
Your life must have been very sad then
But seriously, that, in a way, is a very good analogy:
The song starts off lighthearted, but then tenses, with it seeming that there is no way out of the sadness.
Then, at 5:44, all the emotion crushes down upon you, and you realise that there is hope, at 6:45.
In your old age, you come to accept your fate, now at 8:18. As your dementia consumes you, your mind and soul falls apart in 9:03.
As you slowly die, at 9:21, slowly becoming nothing more than a body of flesh, and hear the heart monitor stop beeping, at 11:09, your life vanishes: it is no more.
Only a narcissist can come up with that statement dwelling in self-importance or it is sarcasm ... then it is okay I guess ;)
@@JohnKuhles1966, it that case, kindly consider the comment as a product of self-irony, not selfishness.
@@digmsymii321 I knew you gonna say that because I have done the same in the past (not anymore) ... because it is "nothing burger" shallow "feedback" loop
Awesome PWM manipulation! I wonder if Galway has seen this... I remember stopping the tape as soon as the loading theme started on so many games.
Over 11 minutes long from an 8kB file... pure magic!
Less than a single frame of the video used to play it.
amazing still listen to it regularly and all his other stuff
9:18 is meant to torture some SID chips
Wow what a masterpiece of Gaming Music.
Still one of the most original pieces of computer music ever produced.
это просто фантастика!!!!!!
it's fantastic
this is seriously awesome
MY GOD ITS FULL OF STARS
Awe-inspiring
Let us bow to one of the holy trinity of C64 music gods, that which is Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, and Jeroen Tel. I will make many sacrifices in your honor, holy ones.
Tel was an early talent but is too fucked up to be listed.
@@LarsTragel-zh7ei?
I like these wha-wha-, phaser- and flanger-effekts
Back in the day I never heard this in its entirety. Whoa. Pretty hardcore.
I wish I could "STAY FOREVER"
Another visitor.
0:23 I like how he uses pulse waves to create a sort of e-piano sound
you can make one, using sine wave
@@Sarwex117 The C64 doesn't have sine waves.
@@jackcimino8822 i mean, aside from c64
@@jackcimino8822 it can if you use the low pass filter
back then I just had the song running on the c64 and then played on the floor with star wars figures
Lets see Vib Ribon traverse this lol
Hoho she will trip in the ending
If you stare at a point behind your screen, you get nice 3D effect.
I guess this is what you get recommended when you can’t stop watching oscilloscope videos of Tim Follin music, definitely not complaining
This is Nice. Lovet it.....
Imagine the "docking scene" in "Interstellar" with THIS music in the background....
"It's not possible!"
"No: it's necessary."
........
Mind blowing.
so awesome ... I was parallized from the first time I heard that tune....
+Gringomania Paralyzed. I see what you did there.
*I feel like a god, smiling in the face of the abyss.*
Epic, epic fucking shit from my childhood. Oh yes.
there's some magic in there
Awesome stuff. Puts you into another world.
What an eternal journey❤
Awesome.
I do kind of wonder if the BBC Proms had a Video Games Prom of orchestral arrangements of video game music that included this piece.
I can imagine the meme now..
_Mind meltingly awesome orchestral piece_
BBC Narrator: And that was Tim Fallon's composition, "Opening theme tune to Fruit Machine Simulator" originally composed for the Commodre VIC 20 in 1984.
Upper vs Middle vs lower class struggle in an oscope. Impressive.
superb
I remember, my TV haven't has audio out, so I had to wire it directly from speakers to a connect it to hi-fi :)
sure is pure
One word: Intense.
Wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow...
COMMODORE 64:
Your limited to three channel momo, what's the best you can come up with??
MARTIN GALWAY:
Hold my chip tune.
2:33 WHERE IT GETS BUMPIN'
Génial avec l'oscilloscope !
9:18 when you decide to chop down a red oak tree with a chainsaw
And then the chainsaw starts playing the guitar
I love the oscilloscopes (sometimes it's square) from 2003, it's trendy ... keep it up
I wonder if anyone's noticed but they used this theme in the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. It can be found under the name "Nazgul theme"
Platypus Cloud Kingdom
This one is the original tune.
good memories.
That ending. Woah.
The ending reminds me a lot of the ending to Daft Punk's RAM, Contact.
First days of humanity
sublime
chiptune therapy
Galways magnum opus? I think so.
2:33 here we go...
OK that was crazy good
Beauty.
ADSR to the fullest! And my 60Hz monitor does not deserve it... They where doing 200 Hz by this time...
Music starts sounding professional at 2:32
Wonder what it would sound like if Martin had stereo?!
Okay, how is pulse+triangle fading into pulse+saw? (at the end, top channel)
Okay. At 9:20 onwards, he's DEFINITELY taking the piss. Heh.