Music

“I’ve been expecting you…”

Why is the music between the 16-bit versions different? Two artists composed music for Wicked – Richard Joseph (Amiga and C64) and Wally Beben (Atari ST). According to the review in “The One” magazine, issue 10, “…since Joseph is primarily an Amiga man, an ST music specialist Wally Beben (the man behind the soundtracks for R-Type and Tetris) was brought in. Despite the fact that the two musicians were given identical briefs, they produced completely different scores.”

The music is a major contributing factor to the atmosphere of the game, and is fondly remembered as some of the stand-out compositions of the 16-bit games era. Chills still run down your spine listening to Richard Joseph’s ending theme.

To celebrate Wicked’s 35th Anniversary, here are the Epic Arrangement of Richard Joseph’s opening and ending theme.

Here are recordings of the music from Wicked from the 16 and 8-bit versions of the game.

Amiga (RJ)	C64 (RJ)
Wicked Opening Theme	Wicked Opening Theme
Eye of Infinity	Eye of Infinity
Ending Theme	Ending Theme

Atari ST (WB)	Modern [Epic] Arrangement (SA)
Wicked Opening Theme	Wicked Opening Theme (Sample)
Eye of Infinity	Eye of Infinity (Sample)
Ending Theme	Ending Theme (Sample)
Game Won	“I’ve been expecting you…” (Demonic voice reversed)
Constellation Won

Interview with Paul Norris in Freeze64 Issue 77

There is a new interview with Paul Norris in the current issue of Freeze64. Whilst the issue predominantly features the game Zoids (an earlier Commodore 64 game that he wrote), the interview does include a section devoted to Wicked. You can get the issue from https://freeze64.com/freeze64-issue-77/

Sound effects event system

Previously, I thought a way to uncover what was happening in the code in Wicked was to look at the sound effects and tie the sounds to when they were triggered. I was left looking at where the value of D0 was set, and this led me into discovering the event signalling mechanism in Wicked. […]

Manhattan Distance

The way growth spreads in Wicked has always fascinated me. Ever since I read that the four types of growth have different ‘intelligences’ in the player’s guides, I’ve wanted to figure out exactly how it works. Now, after digging into the game’s code, I’ve tracked down the growth routine, and with some help from Aira […]

Disassembling with AI

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work, and so I’ve not been able to spend much time with the disassembly. I decided to experiment with ChatGPT to see if that could give me a speed boost. Obviously, the dream would be to outsource all the effort to a tool that could quickly and […]

Using sound effects to identify routines

My next idea for identifying blocks of code comes from the idea that when an event happens in the game, a sound effect is usually played – for example, when shooting, there is a “shooting” sound effect. If I can figure out the addresses of the sound effects, it might be a clue as to […]