Music plagiarism? Pulse Warrior/Pro Powerboat Simulator

equinox

I used to play Pulse Warrior a lot and always enjoyed its music (even though there's some glitch whereby the tune eventually corrupts itself and starts sounding like a weird broken radio).

Today I listened to the AY file from Pro Powerboat Simulator on WoS and noticed that one of the tunes was a different arrangement of that Pulse Warrior music.

I wonder how this came about. Both games were also released on the C64, and C64 Pulse Warrior has (a better version of) the Spectrum tune; however, Powerboat Sim on the C64 has totally different music (by David Whittaker, and also apparently used in "Red Max").

The ZX Powerboat tune is credited to Paul Hiley, who definitely doesn't have a credit in Pulse Warrior, while the C64 one on which it seems to be based was done by Steve Barrett. I wonder whether he sneakily "borrowed" the melody, not realising that Pulse Warrior had had a ZX conversion.

deadpan666

I seem to remember quite a few Codemasters games having the same tunes as others....

mulder

Unrelated, but you know that the music from one level of Lazy Jones on the C64 was used in a dance track a while back? Well, I was listening to all the music from Lazy Jones a couple of years ago and realised some levels just had recreations of pop hits such as Blancmange 'Living on the ceiling'.

equinox

deadpan666 wrote: »

I seem to remember quite a few Codemasters games having the same tunes as others....

Pulse Warrior wasn't a Codies game, though.

chev

equinox wrote: »

Pulse Warrior wasn't a Codies game, though.

Could be another case of copyright infringement. There was plenty of it going on at the time. Although it seems more likely that the tune was licensed rather than bought outright. I'm fairly sure there were a few tunes that turned up in different games from different software houses, although the only one I can think of off hand was Rob Hubbard's track 4 from Human Race (Mastertronic/C64) which was reused in Goldrunner (Microdeal/ST).

equinox

mulder wrote: »

Unrelated, but you know that the music from one level of Lazy Jones on the C64 was used in a dance track a while back? Well, I was listening to all the music from Lazy Jones a couple of years ago and realised some levels just had recreations of pop hits such as Blancmange 'Living on the ceiling'.

An aside: I would very strongly recommend Makke's album "It's Binary, Baby" to anybody who likes a bit of game music. It's a collection of electronic cover versions of various '80s game tracks (mostly C64-oriented, but not to the exclusion of other platforms), a lot of them with humorous lyrics added.

I mention this now because one of them is based on the Lazy Jones tune. "Jones was quite a lazy man / Of game designers he was a fan / Was happy as long as he got paid / He spent his day in the arcade..." :-)

Bandit

This plagiarism business is something I find quite fascinating. I've really had my eyes opened to some things that have come up on here over the years. I'd be very interested for somebody to come up with a little app that does batch processing on a directory of zx games and compares runs of similar bytes.

Now I've actually done this myself but only for checking one program against the other at a time and snapshots only too so not much use really :) But! As primitive as it is, it does work and can sniff out that there's somert up with, say, the three programs listed in this thread and further investigation is required. It doesn't think anything is wrong with Pulse Warrior and Pro Boat though, but it's a different arrangement right, not total copy?

I just need to find some mug to do one for all zx file formats and things like .zip too that will process a batch load. You just point it at the directory and come back in a couple of weeks to see the findings. Hmmm, now who..

*sends an email to Woody*

rich_chandler

Bandit wrote: »

This plagiarism business is something I find quite fascinating. I've really had my eyes opened to some things that have come up on here over the years. I'd be very interested for somebody to come up with a little app that does batch processing on a directory of zx games and compares runs of similar bytes.

Now I've actually done this myself but only for checking one program against the other at a time and snapshots only too so not much use really :) But! As primitive as it is, it does work and can sniff out that there's somert up with, say, the three programs listed in this thread and further investigation is required. It doesn't think anything is wrong with Pulse Warrior and Pro Boat though, but it's a different arrangement right, not total copy?

I just need to find some mug to do one for all zx file formats and things like .zip too that will process a batch load. You just point it at the directory and come back in a couple of weeks to see the findings. Hmmm, now who..

*sends an email to Woody*

Bloody hell BB, how many pseudonyms do you need?

deadpan666

equinox wrote: »

Pulse Warrior wasn't a Codies game, though.

Hehe...Yeah, I know...I was just saying Codies re-used their own tunes a lot! I guess sometimes where music is concerned, it would belong to the actual composer (like say, Rob Hubbard) ?? That's maybe how we see it in some games from different companies....

Don't think that would be the case with Pulse Warrior/Pro Powerboat though....A "cover" version perhaps ??

TMR

deadpan666 wrote: »

Hehe...Yeah, I know...I was just saying Codies re-used their own tunes a lot! I guess sometimes where music is concerned, it would belong to the actual composer (like say, Rob Hubbard) ?? That's maybe how we see it in some games from different companies....

Don't think that would be the case with Pulse Warrior/Pro Powerboat though....A "cover" version perhaps ??

Actually, my money would say you're pretty much spot on first time; the music for the C64 version of Pulse Warrior was composed by Steve Barrett and some of his later works was for Codemasters; SAS Combat Simulator tune 1 on the C64 is a cover of Pulse Warrior but without the sampled drums, if the Spectrum version has the same tune we have a winner and it's just a spot of Codies recycling. =-)

joefish

mulder wrote: »

Unrelated, but you know that the music from one level of Lazy Jones on the C64 was used in a dance track a while back? Well, I was listening to all the music from Lazy Jones a couple of years ago and realised some levels just had recreations of pop hits such as Blancmange 'Living on the ceiling'.

GreenCard

Just noticed that the music at the very end of Rambo (at 4:12 in the video below) is (almost) the same as the music in Kung Fu Master. Felt the need to share that with you all. :-)

leespoons

GreenCard wrote: »

Just noticed that the music at the very end of Rambo (at 4:12 in the video below) is (almost) the same as the music in Kung Fu Master. Felt the need to share that with you all. :-)

So it is! Same programmer (David Anderson) on both games though, so if he has plagiarised it, he's done it twice ;)

GreenCard

leespoons wrote: »

So it is! Same programmer (David Anderson) on both games though, so if he has plagiarised it, he's done it twice ;)

Haha! Good point! Probably should've checked that before posting. :lol:

daveysludge

Another bit of plagiarism, Draughts Genius and the 48K version of Winter Games (ski jump bit I think) share the same tune, there doesn't seem to be any link between the programmers either.