game arts | Through the Shattered Lens

VGM Entry 27: PC-8801
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If I want to cover every field, it would be a certain mistake to overlook the impact of the NEC PC-8801 during this time. I have incorporated a few titles into the mix already. Thexder (Game Arts, 1985) by Hibiki Godai was the first noteworthy soundtrack for the platform I’ve found making use of the Yamaha YM2203 sound chip. Xanadu Scenario II (Nihon Falcom, 1986), predominantly the work of Takahito Abe, and Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished (Nihon Falcom, 1987) by Yuzo Koshiro the following year were developed for various platforms, but the PC-8801 seems to have been Falcom’s flagship. Unfortunately I’ve found it nearly impossible, between the language barrier and the myriad ports, to find suitable examples of most of Takahito Abe’s other PC-8801 works, and Yuzo Koshiro’s pre-1988 works seem to be just as obscure. But were they the only composers making the system shine?

Silpheed (Game Arts, 1986) was another product of Hibiki Godai, at least as best I can tell. The only credits I could find were for the 1988 MS-DOS port by Sierra On-Line, which list Hibiki Godai, Nobuyuki Aoshima, Fumihito Kasatani, and Hiromi Ohba. Since the majority of the other names in the credits are Americans, it’s quite possible that all four of these musicians had a hand in the original composition.

In a way, the music feels a little bland compared to that of the European musicians I’ve recently discussed. This is certainly a product of differences in sound chips, but I am at least a little inclined to believe that both the distorted nature of Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum sound and the atmosphere of experimentation and bold composition that permeated European sound programming did in fact inspire better music than competing scenes managed to produce at the time. Even so, Silpheed has some exceptional songs–most notably the one beginning at 13:00–and it’s a good example of what Japanese computer gaming sounded like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aby9Upk3hQ8

Or so I like to believe. Sorcerian (Nihon Falcom, 1987) is yet another Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe collaboration, with Mieko Ishikawa additionally credited. Kenji Kawai is listed separately as the 1992 PC-Engine arranger, so for once we can at least make some distinction in that regard. But so long as the same names keep popping up, I can’t help but think I’m only getting a very small sample of a much larger field. And furthermore, the significance of the PC-8801 for these titles musically is not a given. Almost all of Nihon Falcom’s games were released across an enormous spread of systems which typically included at least the PC-8801, PC-9801, Sharp X1, and MSX2. As has been shown with Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, this entailed endless variation and reinterpretation of the central themes. “Dark Fact” almost seemed to evolve with every port, with no clear explanation as to whether Yuzo Koshiro changed his mind about how it ought to sound or port arrangers independently reinterpreted the music at every step, often basing their take on previous ports rather than the original.

If these composers knew that their songs would take so many forms, did they really write their music for the PC-8801 at all, or were they aiming for compositions which could function through a wide array of sound configurations? Or, if they were personally involved in the ports, did they perhaps gear their music towards a preferred system for which the game might not necessarily be released on first? No amount of exploring PC-8801 compositions has helped to clarify these questions.

The problem is compounded by a complete absence of credits for the vast majority of PC-8801 games. In the absence of a PC88 game library (I am eternally in debt to such sites as Lemon 64, World of Spectrum, and Lemon Amiga), I have absolutely no clue what Shinra Bansho (Nihon Telenet, 1987) is beyond the name of its developer. This is my second favorite PC-8801 soundtrack (after Snatcher, which I’ll be addressing later), but I haven’t a clue who wrote it. Perhaps Nihon implies Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe, if they were the only house musicians, but since this is Nihon Telenet, not Nihon Falcom, and I have no idea what that distinction entails, it would be folly to ascribe any artist attribution.

I am entirely at the mercy of grad1u52 on youtube for finding PC-8801 music in the first place, as he is the only member taking active steps to preserve it, but the information he supplies for each game is unfortunately non-existent. Lots of other titles, the music for which is readily available, fall into this same boat.

The only substantial hint I can offer is that composers hardly ever freelanced at this time, and developers rarely boasted a large sound staff. If you can identify a developer’s house composer in the mid-80s, it almost always seems to be the case that they scored every release during their tenure. Square and Enix make a good case in point. Such obscure PC-8801 titles as Cruise Chaser Blassty (Square, 1986) and Jesus: Dreadful Bio-Monster (Enix, 1987) were composed by Nobuo Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama respectively, not passed off to secondary musicians (not that Uematsu had succeeded in making a name for himself by 1986). Both soundtracks were second rate, with Uematsu sounding completely lost in a non-fantasy setting and Sugiyama cutting corners to the extent of including tracks from Dragon Quest, but that is quite besides the point. With the company consistently identifying the composer, there might still exist a means to figure these old, cryptically credited PC-8801 games out short of learning Japanese.

VGM Entry 07: Other chip options
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I am at the unfortunate disadvantage of having no clue what key terms such as “FM Synthesis” and “Programmable Sound Generator” really mean, and no amount of reading technical explanations or listening to arbitrary examples of audio employing one or the other is really going to fill me in. I feel like it is the very sort of thing this series of articles is intended to explain, but it’s not currently within my grasp.

One thing I’d like to know is what makes arcade games like Tube Panic (Nichibutsu/Fujitek, 1984) sound so much better than their arcade predecessors of only a year or two prior. (Unfortunately this composer’s name has eluded me, perhaps lost in translation.) This game uses a General Instrument AY-3-8910 chip, or so I am told, which is a PSG. So did Jungle Hunt, and the two are worlds apart. Jungle Hunt‘s three very basic tones could barely hold themselves together, constantly breaking out of rhythm and sounding quite primitive even when they all synced up. Of course the glitchiness was part of the charm, but Tube Panic is an entirely different animal. There is definitely no sense that the system is struggling to contain the music, and the tones are much fuller. What changed? And if it’s the case that later arcade games stacked multiple audio chips where early ones did not, how exactly does this effect the end product?

There is one thing I’ve noticed, and it’s probably both an amateur observation for those who know what they’re talking about and a pointless one for those who don’t. But it seems to me like audio employing FM-synthesis is much cleaner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3on20-Tw4DY

Thexder (Game Arts, 1985) for instance was composed by Hibiki Godai and released for the NEC PC-8801 the same year that this system began to incorporate a Yamaha YM2203 sound chip, which, as best I understand it, used FM synthesis. Whatever that actually entails, what I seem to be hearing here is a lack of distortion never attained with the AY-3-8910, or with the Commodore 64 SID for that matter (another PSG). That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing–distortion was the perfecting touch to the early Ultima soundtracks (the Mockingboard also employed multiple AY-3-8910 chips) and it would be the focal point for some of the best ZX Spectrum titles. But there is a noticeable difference in clarity, and if I had to guess I’d say it’s the dominant difference between FM synthesis chips and PSGs.

The most impressive early consequence of this cleaner sound is Marble Madness (Atari, 1984), which used the YM2151, an FM synthesis chip similar to the YM2203. The music Brad Fuller and Hal Cannon manage to create here is gorgeous and completely unbecoming of an otherwise conceptually mundane video game. The music of Marble Madness can essentially function as a stand alone semi-ambient synth album. With a few exceptions and a little longer content it could have been commercially released independent of any game to reasonable acclaim, and it is not all that particularly different from the sort of works you might expect on the Yamaha keyboards employed by 1980s synth musicians. Tasking Brad Fuller and Hal Cannon with the job and providing them with the sound chip to get it done might have been one of the only things Atari did right in the 1980s.

The last thing to note here is that Earl Vickers is credited as the Marble Madness sound programmer. This is one of the earliest games for which I’ve noticed different names associated with ‘composition’ and ‘sound programming’, and it’s a confusing distinction which will impact plenty of future discussions.