Chris Hülsbeck

Huelsbeck's professional career began in 1986, when his composition Shades won a music competition organized by the German computer magazine 64'er. This led to a position at Rainbow Arts, where he composed music for games including The Great Giana Sisters. Huelsbeck also developed music tools for home computers. In 1986, he published SoundMonitor for the Commodore 64 and later co-created the TFMX ("The Final Musicsystem eXtended") sound editor with programmer Peter Thierolf. During the early 1990s, Huelsbeck composed music for the Turrican series and co-founded the game developer Kaiko, whose releases included Gem'X and Apidya. In 1998, he moved to the United States to join Factor 5, where he worked on the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series. Huelsbeck continued composing in later years, including Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams (2012), Tiny Thor (2023) and X-Out: Resurfaced (2025).

Huelsbeck's music was performed in the Game Concerts series in Leipzig between 2003 and 2007, including works from Apidya, Turrican II, Turrican 3 and The Great Giana Sisters. On 23 August 2008, Symphonic Shades was presented in Cologne as a concert devoted entirely to Huelsbeck's music, performed by the WDR Radio Orchestra and the FILMharmonic Choir Prague. It was the first video game music concert to be broadcast live on the radio. In 2009, selections from Symphonic Shades were performed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra as part of Sinfonia Drammatica, alongside music by Yoko Shimomura.