"A beginning is a very delicate time"
During the whole period of the 1980s, the very first games released on every brand new microcomputer are worthy of interest. They usually represent the feat of having been created by programmers who discovered the machine while trying to
deliver rush their games within a tight deadline, even if that means taking liberties with some of the most obvious legal concerns.
In this rush for release , the company
Rainbow Arts has come,
several times, really close to a
blatant evidence of plagiarism. It appears however that the game
"The Wall", published in 1988, slipped under the legal radar.
When the first floppy disk boots, the player is welcomed by a sampled loop of rather rare musical quality for a computer game. The arrangement, which is both rich and balanced, draws attention and stands out from the digitized music introductions of this era, specifically composed for video games and
usually much more
cheesy.
It turns out this is for a good reason: the intro music of
The Wall, on
Amiga, is
sampled from
Run like hell by
Pink Floyd, taken from the album from which the game borrows its name.
The surprise does not stop there, because during loading, a sample of
Phil Collins'
Take me home vibrates in the loudspeaker.
Finally, once the game has started, it is another sample of
Jann Hammer's
Crockett's theme that fills the audio background, barely covered by the sound effects. In 1984,
Jann Hammer fully produced the Miami Vice theme on a
Fairlight CMI, the first standard of synthesizer/sequencer to feature sampling as the basis for an instrument. This technique would finally appear in 1987 on the Amiga with
Ultimate Soundtracker.
How is it
possible, in retrospective, that no one noticed
so many ocurrences of plagiarism in the very game video game?
It might be that the audio copyright, in 1988, was not a matter at all in the video game industry, nor was it to the Music Majors awareness...
Sample 1: Run like hell (Pink Floyd)
Note that the sample is not played back at the frequency at which it was sampled. The musical extract and the rhythm are therefore a little slower.
Sample 2: Take me home (Phil Collins)
Here too, the replay of the sample is greatly slowed down, which completely changes the rhythm.
Sample 3: Crockett's Theme (Jann Hammer)
