alph lyla | Through the Shattered Lens

VGM Entry 37: DuckTales
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Part of going over these older game scores involves a lot of legwork in tracking down their composers. Sometimes authorship is ascribed in a straight forward manner that raises no alarms, but more often developers were especially cryptic about their musical staff. Composers tended to go by aliases rather than proper names, and sometimes confusion between composition and sound programming lead to false assumptions. That is the topic I’d like to focus on again for this next 1989 NES title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdlwhzXs24k

If you are not already familiar with NES music to some extent, this selection might seem like a joke at first glance. And after all, the first track in the video is nothing but a standard rendition of the original television theme. But as the standard expectation passes on and the soundtrack comes into its own, you’ll soon be forced to admit that DuckTales (Capcom, 1989) is indeed among the very best on the NES. If “The Amazon” (1:13) fails to instantly convince you, “The Moon” (2:16) most certainly should. It’s sad and beautiful to an extent approaching Yasunori Mitsuda’s “To Far Away Times”.

The funny thing is it’s not entirely clear who wrote it. You will almost always see it credited to Yoshihiro Sakaguchi (Yukichan no Papa)–the same Sakaguchi credited alongside Tamayo Kawamoto on Forgotten Worlds. This came into question in 2010. Yoshihiro Sakaguchi is actually a name I first encountered when I was listening to Mega Man and Mega Man 2, but I ran into an interview with Manami Matsumae, Takashi Tateishi, and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi on Square Enix Music Online (SEMO) which sorted all of that out.

I’ve mentioned a number of times the vaguaries surrounding the conversion of composition into actual game sound, especially in ports. When we’re talking Commodore 64 music this isn’t really an issue, as the composers were almost always responsible for the full project from start to finish as best I can tell. But when you get into platform systems like the NES and Genesis, and full sound teams like Taito’s Zuntata and Capcom’s Alph Lyla, the business gets excruciatingly vague. The interview expressly reveals that Manami Matsumae “did the background music and sound effects on the original Mega Man“, and Takashi Tateishi “did the background music and sound effects on Mega Man 2,” while Yoshihiro Sakaguchi “was in charge of programming the sound driver.” Where is the dividing line? Was Sakaguchi’s job to program the specific tones chosen by the composers, or did he choose the tones based on their compositions? Takashi Tateishi’s comments lead me to believe that there was some collaboration involed, and the divide in work load was by no means black and white. But we’re not talking the difference between say, composing a score and conducting an orchestra. The vast differences in quality between different ports, such as those I exemplified through “Dark Fact”/”Final Battle” from Ys I, should give you an idea of how absolutely critical the programmer/arranger/whatever you want to call its role must have been on these early systems.

My relevant point here is that any revelation that Yoshihiro Sakaguchi did not compose the vast majority of the music he is credited with should not necessarily downplay his significance. As for DuckTales in particular, it is quite safe to assume that it was composed by Hiroshige Tonomura, not Yoshihiro Sakaguchi. While the published content of the SEMO interviews never specifically addresses DuckTales, Chris on vgmdb, who had some insider knowledge, stated in responce to the DuckTales question that “there are a lot of other credits with his name in, sometimes only his name in, but Sakaguchi denied his involvement composing them.” User dissident93 followed this up by claiming to have contacted Manami Matsumae on Facebook and confirmed that Hiroshige Tonomura was the composer. Hiroshige Tonomura’s stint with Capcom was brief, joining Alph Lyla in 1988 and leaving alongside Tamayo Kawamoto for Zuntata only two years later, probably adding to the obscurity of his credits there. I am convinced he wrote it, and you probably should be too, but it does make for a fun little detective story.

VGM Entry 32: Arcade and C64 in ’88
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Beyond the NES, a lot of great things were going on in 1988 that I am largely still unaware of. Late 80s arcade and computer gaming gets a lot less publicity today than the Nintendo counterpart, and even some of the best require a bit of digging to uncover, but here are a few I found worthy of mention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skXQAXpN0As

Jeroen Tel is a Dutch composer born in 1972. I am not sure when he first got into the business, but his works really start to stand out for the first time in 1988. Cybernoid and Cybernoid II, both developed by Raffaele Cecco and published by Hewson Consultants, were also both released in 1988. The latter’s main theme is particularly catchy. The game was a sort of weird combination space shooter and action side scroller, hedging more towards the latter. It appeared on a number of platforms, but its C64 version is by far the most memorable, specifically because of Tel’s musical contributions. He would go on to be remembered alongside Rob Hubbard as one of the greatest Commodore 64 composers. His Cybernoid II music has even been performed by live orchestras, though the success of converting such an essentially chippy tune is dubious. Suffice to say this track is catchy in its original form, and clocking in at 6 minutes, it provides a pleasant motivation for extended gameplay.

The arcade had long established itself as the primary venue for optimal sound quality. The general lack of great arcade soundtracks in my experience makes me wonder if I’m not missing an enormous and important range of video game music. The works of Tamayo Kawamoto in Ghouls’n Ghosts (Capcom, 1988) certainly upholds the higher standard. The majority of the soundtrack is rather dark and ambient, and quite successful as such, but it’s the unique “Stage Two” theme which really stands out. For a relatively unknown video game composer, Tamayo Kawamoto has quite a history. She began her career on Capcom’s Alph Lyla house band, composing arcade music as early as 1984 to include the classic Commando. A few years after Ghouls’n Ghosts she would move on to join Zuntata, the Taito house band responsible for Darius and quite a number of other arcade classics.

The Ghouls’n Ghosts soundtrack, and “Stage Two” in particular, would ultimately be remembered in the form of Tim Follin’s Commodore 64 arrangement, not Tamayo Kawamoto’s original, and for good reason, but let’s give credit where credit’s due.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVGBQuYvWsk

Even so, the world of the arcade was fading fast, and Zuntata were one of the few acts still putting their all into it. Some bad research on the part of youtube posters lead me to believe for a time that the music of the 1993 Sega-CD/Mega-CD port of The Ninja Warriors (Taito, 1988) was in fact the original, and it’s this latter version for which the game is probably most famous. But unlike with Ghouls’n Ghosts, the music to The Ninja Warriors didn’t conceptually change over time. It just improved in the light of better technology.

The soundtrack of The Ninja Warriors was headed by Hisayoshi Ogura, who also lead the composition of Darius. The track featured here, “Daddy Mulk”, is the most famous in the game. (I have no idea what the origin of this peculiar name is, and I wonder if it’s not an afterthought in consideration of the apparent sound of the electronic voice in the music.) Now that I am aware of the difference between the 1988 arcade soundtrack and its 1993 Sega-CD counterpart I’m a bit surprised that the arcade quality is quite this low. I mean, it’s outstanding compared to anything on competing platforms, but it doesn’t sound like any technological upgrades had been made since Darius two years prior. Another sign of the arcade’s fading significance? Perhaps. Zuntata certainly weren’t cutting corners, as their live renditions and later adaptations of the soundtrack would show. They were still kings of the arcade in 1988, even if this was a dying kingdom, and their legacy is well earned.