1951–1979: Precursors The earliest precursors to chip music can be found in the early history of
computer music. In 1951, the computers
CSIRAC and
Ferranti Mark 1 were used to perform real-time synthesized digital music in public. One of the earliest commercial computer music albums came from the First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival, held August 25, 1978, as part of the Personal Computing '78 show. The First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival recordings were published by Creative Computing in 1979. The
Global TV program
Science International (1976–1979) credited a
PDP-11/10 for the music.
Mid-1970s–1980s: Video game origins Chiptune music began to appear with the
video game music produced during the
golden age of video arcade games. An early example was the opening tune in
Tomohiro Nishikado's
arcade game Gun Fight (1975). The first video game to use a continuous background soundtrack was Tomohiro Nishikado's 1978 release
Space Invaders, which had four simple
chromatic descending
bass notes repeating in
a loop, though it was dynamic and interacted with the player, increasing pace as the enemies descended on the player. It was also one of the earliest games to use a
digital-to-analog converter to produce
sampled sounds. That same year, the first video game to feature
speech synthesis was also released,
Sunsoft's
shoot 'em up arcade game
Stratovox. Some of their early music, including their 1978 self-titled
debut album, were
sampling sounds from popular arcade games such as
Space Invaders and
Gun Fight. In addition to incorporating sounds from contemporary video games into their music, the band would later have a major influence on much of the video game and chiptune music produced during the
8-bit and
16-bit eras.
Sega's 1982 arcade game
Super Locomotive for example featured a chiptune
cover version of YMO's "
Rydeen" (1979); several later
computer games also covered the song, such as
Trooper Truck (1983) by
Rabbit Software as well as ''
Daley Thompson's Decathlon (1984) and Stryker's Run'' (1986) arranged by
Martin Galway. By 1983,
Konami's arcade game
Gyruss utilized five sound chips along with a digital-to-analog converter, which were partly used to create an electronic rendition of
J. S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. In 1984, former YMO member
Haruomi Hosono released an album produced entirely from Namco arcade game samples entitled
Video Game Music, an early example of a chiptune record and the first video game music album. The record featured the work of Namco's chiptune composers: Toshio Kai (
Pac-Man in 1980), Nobuyuki Ohnogi (
Galaga,
New Rally-X and
Bosconian in 1981, and
Pole Position in 1982), and Yuriko Keino (
Dig Dug and
Xevious in 1982).
Early 1980s–1994: FM synthesis A major advance for chip music was the introduction of
frequency modulation synthesis (FM synthesis), first commercially released by
Yamaha for their
digital synthesizers and FM
sound chips, which began appearing in arcade machines from the early 1980s. Arcade game composers utilizing FM synthesis at the time included Konami's
Miki Higashino (
Gradius,
Yie-Ar Kung Fu,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and
Sega's
Hiroshi Kawaguchi (
Space Harrier,
Hang-On,
Out Run). By the early 1980s, significant improvements to
personal computer game music were made possible with the introduction of
digital FM synthesis sound.
Yamaha began manufacturing FM
synth boards for Japanese computers such as the
NEC PC-8801 and
PC-9801 in the early 1980s, and by the mid-1980s, the PC-8801 and
FM-7 had built-in FM sound. This allowed computer game music to have greater complexity than the simplistic
beeps from internal speakers. These FM synth boards produced a "warm and pleasant sound" that musicians such as
Yuzo Koshiro and
Takeshi Abo utilized to produce music that is still highly regarded within the chiptune community.
Fujitsu also released the
FM Sound Editor software for the FM-7 in 1985, providing users with a user-friendly interface to create and edit synthesized music. In 1987, FM synthesis became available for Western computers when Canadian company
Ad Lib released the AdLib Music Synthesizer Card for the
IBM Personal Computer, while Singapore-based
Creative Labs incorporated the AdLib card's sound chip into its
Sound Blaster card in 1989. Both cards were widely supported by
MS-DOS game developers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The widespread adoption of FM synthesis by consoles would later be one of the major advances of the
16-bit era, by which time 16-bit arcade machines were using multiple FM synthesis chips. Despite later advances in audio technology, he would continue to use older PC-8801 hardware to produce chiptune soundtracks for series such as
Streets of Rage (1991–1994) and
Etrian Odyssey (2007–present). and
progressive techno compositions
The soundtrack for
Streets of Rage 2 (1992) is considered "revolutionary" and "ahead of its time" for its "
blend of swaggering house
synths,
dirty electro-funk and
trancey electronic textures that would feel as comfortable in a
nightclub as a video game." For the soundtrack to
Streets of Rage 3 (1994), Koshiro created a new composition method called the "Automated Composing System" to produce "fast-beat techno like
jungle", resulting in innovative and
experimental sounds generated automatically. Koshiro also composed chiptune soundtracks for series such as
Dragon Slayer,
Ys,
Shinobi, and
ActRaiser. Another important FM synth composer was the late
Ryu Umemoto, who composed chiptune soundtracks for various
visual novel and
shoot 'em up games.
1986–present: SID music culture Later on, several demo groups moved to using their own music instead of ripped game music. In 1986, Jeroen "Red" Kimmel studied
Rob Hubbard's player routine and used it for original demo songs before writing a routine of his own in 1987. Hobbyists were also writing their own dedicated music editor software, such as
Chris Hülsbeck's
Soundmonitor which was released as a type-in listing in a 1986 issue of the German C-64 magazine ''
64'er''. The practice of SID music composition has continued seamlessly until this day in conjunction with the
Commodore 64 demoscene.
The High Voltage SID Collection, a comprehensive archive of SID music, contains over 55,000 pieces of SID music. == Mainstream popularity ==