Jochen Hippel

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Jochen Hippel (born October 14, 1971) is a musician from Kirchheimbolanden in southwest Germany. He played one of the most prominent roles in computer music during the 16-bit microcomputer era, composing the music for 10's of games. He was also an experienced Amiga programmer and ported many of Thalion Software's Atari ST titles. He no longer composes music for a living and in 2006 he is working in Logistics for Matheis+Koebig Baustoffe[1]

Jochen's first computer music was a set of Christmas songs that he arranged in a rock style on his school's Commodore 64.

As a member of The Exceptions, using the handle Mad Max, he wrote most of the music for their demos including the B.I.G. Demo (Best In Galaxy). The demo was essentially a large collection of C64 tunes that he ported across to the Atari ST's inferior Yamaha YM2149 sound chip using his own driver to get the most out of it.

He worked as a freelance musician, doing music for many 16-bit games. He eventually joined Thalion Software and wrote music for them. His musical track for the game Amberstar is considered among his best works, and the game and Hippel's music acquired a small cult following. When working with Amiga Hippel stuck to chiptune-like sound - that became his trademark - instead of using more "realistic" instrument sounds that machine's support for digitized sound made possible.

He has released an album called Give it a Try and has composed music for other albums including tracks on Immortal 2 and Immortal 3[2].

A little known fact is that Hippel was also a good programmer, he created all of his own music tools and also ported most of Thalion's early Atari ST titles to the Commodore Amiga. Hippel also created the Amiga 7 voice replay routine which was used in several Thalion and Eclipse titles and later used by Chris Huelsbeck in his TFMX replay routine for the title music of Turrican 2 and 3.