This great piece of game memorabilia is an original music score by Ben Daglish relating to the popular Atari computer game ‘Deflektor’ which he did the 1987 accompanying soundtrack for. Daglish (who very sadly died in 2018) was an extremely influential British composer of computer game music during the 1980s with over 100 game scores to his name. Deflektor however was among his most famous. Ben didn’t really write the music on paper first but would build it up directly into his Commodore computer using the now infamous MOS 6581 SID chip. Therefore as far as I know there are no 1980s ‘originals’ to his music, just the music itself.
Created by Vortex Software and released by Gremlin Graphics Deflektor was a challenging puzzle game in which the player had to adjust a number of mirrors in order to reflect a light beam through a series of mazes. Daglish’s fast-paced accompanying music builds up layers of classic computer generated sound that could only come out of the 1980s and used his trademark guitar style riffs. The track is high energy, clever and memorable and shows why Daglish would attain a cult status among gamers all the way through to the present day.
The paper score offered here was hand written by Daglish in 2013 reproducing his 80s classic and it is believed was intended for the documentary ‘From Bedrooms to Billions‘ by Anthony & Nicola Caulfield. In July 2013 Ben spent a couple of intensive days at the Max Hall recording Studio in England producing music for this documentary so the date and purpose fits his signed date perfectly.
Both Ben’s wife and his music manager have very kindly confirmed for me that this was his signature and handwriting. This would be great framed with the game art beside it.
Dimensions: one folded sheet. 30cm high x 23.5 cm wide folded.
Here is the original Deflektor music and game via Youtube- enjoy! :
