Tag Archives: taito

VGM Entry 61: The RPG generation

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 61: The RPG generation
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

The Super Nintendo RPG/Adventure legacy didn’t come over night. But ActRaiser (Enix, 1990), Final Fantasy IV (Square, 1991), and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo, 1991) did not necessarily set the stage, either. RPGs had been huge in Japan for quite some time. The Super Nintendo provided both the capacity to carry them and the consistency to focus costs on a single product (imagine the amount of time and resources which must have went into porting PC RPGs to a half-dozen different systems). This didn’t inspire computer gaming companies to switch gears–Nihon Falcom continued to pump out their titles for the PC-9801 all the way up to 1996, slowly switching to Windows with only one Super Famicom title, Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin (1995), to show for themselves in between. But other publishers saw RPGs as a more viable option now, and Capcom, Taito, and Nintendo hopped on the bandwagon while Square and Enix picked up the pace. (Konami held off producing RPGs until the Playstation era.)

The fact that these types of games did not start to appear in abundance on the SNES until 1992 might have been a simple consequence of developers spending most of 1991 making them. 1992 to 1995 were the glory days of SNES fantasy gaming, and perhaps the crowning era in the history of video game music.

Capcom’s first big RPG was Breath of Fire (1993), credited to a long list of composers including Yasuaki Fujita (Mega Man 3), Mari Yamaguchi (Mega Man 5), Minae Fujii (Mega Man 4), Yoko Shimomura (Gargoyle’s Quest, Street Fighter II), and Tatsuya Nishimura. Thankfully track by track authorship is actually available, and we can see that Yasuaki ‘Bun Bun’ Fujita did the grand bulk of the composing, with Mari Yamaguchi contributing five songs and the other three chipping in a song each.

Here’s a track list for the compilation:

(0:00) The Dragon Warrior
(1:24) Fate
(2:54) Starting the Journey ~Breath of Fire~
(4:11) Deep Forest
(5:18) Battling
(6:02) Sand Palace
(7:07) Dejection
(8:05) Fishing

As a series, Breath of Fire was not really all that well noted for its contributions to video game music. I don’t want to blow off the rest of the games here and now before revisiting them, but I distinctly remember playing through most of them with the radio on (I never actually played Breath of Fire V). The original Breath of Fire was definitely more of an exception than than the rule. The soundtrack is peppered with memorable, moody numbers. It’s most famous song, at least in so far as it was carried on in future installments, is Mari Yamaguchi’s overworld theme, “Starting the Journey”. But it is Yasuaki Fujita’s bleaker contributions that really make the game stand out from the crowd. “Deep Forest” and “Dejection” could both easily pass for ending credits themes to some complex plotline defying the good versus evil stereotype–the sort of RPG we all crave but rarely find outside of the Suikoden series. They’re both delightfully dark and finite, screaming “it’s over, but did you really win?”

Of course neither of them are actually credits music, and Breath of Fire was never known for its plot. The series had an incredible knack for being simultaneously completely forgettable and quite fun to play–perhaps a consequence of actually challenging combat (at least, in comparison to the vast majority of turn-based RPGs.) When it came to music, the original was the only one that actually made a lasting impression on me when I played it.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, composed by Yasunori Shiono, was another series starter in 1993. There were actually only two Lufia titles in the 90s, and I suspect the later handheld releases came as an afterthought. Taito were prolific producers with a history in the gaming industry dating all the way back to 1973, but they had always shied away from the RPG market. With the cooperation of newly-established developers Neverland Co., Lufia would be their first attempt.

As for the history of Neverland, something on Wikipedia is clearly wrong. It claims Lufia‘s developer was founded on May 7th, 1993, and it claims the game was released on June 25th, 1993. But while Neverland certainly must have had an earlier origin, Lufia does appear to be their first of very few titles. In that regard, the Lufia series was kind of unique. I won’t pretend to know what goes on behind the scenes in the gaming industry (my dream of directing RPGs has always been a total fantasy), but I have to imagine when a producer develops their own game there’s a fairly more intimate degree of interaction between the two sides. Square and Nintendo as of 1993 nearly always developed their own games. The wildcards in the world of non-PC RPGs almost always went through Enix (the most famous developers being Quintet and Chunsoft). Neverland-Taito then seems like a pretty unique pairing–an independent developer working with a producer that had never marketed an RPG.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom was in every manner a rough draft–a sort of prototype for Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, which was infinitely better and one of the best RPGs in the history of the SNES. Unlike Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest (from what I gather), Breath of Fire, Seiken Densetsu, Quintet’s unofficial ‘Soul Blazer Trilogy’, and Zelda really, the Lufia series was both plot-centric and cumulative, taking place in the same world with a continuous history and related/reoccurring characters. As if in collusion with the rest of the development team’s maturation, Yasunori Shiono’s compositions improved substantially in the second title, but we will get to that later.

Good adventure/RPG music was not limited to the Super Nintendo. The Game Boy was a musical instrument par excellence, with by far the most aesthetically pleasing tones of any system on the market lacking diverse instrument sampling. (I hope that’s a suitable delineation for a technical subject of which I still know absolutely nothing.) The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is far and wide my favorite score in the Zelda series. It might have nothing on Ryuji Sasai’s work on Final Fantasy Legend III, but Link’s Awakening brings the Game Boy to life in a really beautiful way. Indeed, its only real fault is a failure to employ his three-dimensional stereo effects. The game’s crowning jewel, Tal Tal Heights, appears early in this compilation (0:30), but the whole score merits attention.

Koji Kondo surprisingly had nothing to do with it. Link’s Awakening was a joint effort between Kazumi Totaka, Minako Hamano, and Kozue Ishikawa, all of whom I’ve yet to mention. Kazumi Totaka actually had a pretty long history with Nintendo, providing music for the sort of games you might expect to hear Soyo Oka on (Mario Paint, Wave Race 64, most notably Animal Crossing, which I do hope I remember to feature if I ever get that far). Minako Hamano was responsible for roughly half of the Super Metroid soundtrack, though her name rapidly fades from the pages of history, and Kozue Ishikawa is a virtual unknown. But this motley crew managed to piece together one of the quintessential scores of the Game Boy, and in doing so earn themselves a place in video game music history.

VGM Entry 32: Arcade and C64 in ’88

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.

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.

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.

VGM Entry 13: Darius

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 13: Darius
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Taito have kindly sent me a letter informing me of their intention to sue me for this post, and in particular for its visual and audio depictions of an out of print soundtrack for an out of print arcade machine, if I do not remove such content immediately. Taito being a subsidiary of Square Enix, I highly encourage you to boycott all Square Enix products in the future. Since their games are terrible these days anyway I am probably doing you a favor.

Unfortunately Hisayoshi Ogura is the one that suffers here, since Square Enix have simultaneously expressed no intention of legally distributing his work and barred all attempts by fans to share it.

It is very easy to get on a one-track mind and focus down home gaming in total disregard for the arcade. Arcade composers rarely had the lasting impact of Nintendo and computer game music, perhaps in part because arcade gaming as a business was pretty much dead by the end of the 80s. Where arcade music is still remembered today, it is usually in the form of NES and C64 port renditions. Yet in the mid-1980s, some producers still placed their finest resources into refining the arcade game first and foremost. Taito’s Zuntata sound team most significantly, and also Konami’s Kukeiha Club and Capcom’s Alph Lyla, were composing arcade music that far exceeded in sound quality anything ever heard on a home system. Taito did it best, and among their eccentric and innovative staff no one shines brighter than Hisayoshi Ogura. When Taito released its arcade shooter Darius in 1986, it achieved a level of sound quality that would not be surpassed until at least the late 1990s.

***Video removed due to Square Enix’s corporate bullying.***
Chaos and Boss 4

A collection of experimental oddities both catchy and disturbing, it could not have been better suited for the game it represents. Darius was experimental and innovative in many ways, featuring a triple-screen ultra-wide display and a non-linear level progression which would mix up the seven stages between (I believe) twenty-six possible maps, creating a slightly different experience on every play through. It even featured multiple endings–something you might not expect from a shooter game.

You probably wouldn’t expect to be fighting giant evil space fish, either. Darius receives pretty mixed reviews from a lot of shooter junkies these days, but if I was going to spend my quarters on anything in 1986 I know it’s the first game I’d have tried. It attempts to awe and bewilder, and it succeeds.

***Video removed due to Square Enix’s corporate bullying.***

You can really tell that Ogura designed his score to exploit every technological possibility available to him. The depth and fullness of the sound is overwhelming. It reminds me of the sort of audio experience I got from Square’s Einhänder–a game I bought specifically for the music. But Einhänder was released in 1997! Darius was 11 years old by then.

If it doesn’t sound that special to you, try plugging in headphones. Much like Kenneth W. Arnold’s Ultima soundtracks, my lousy laptop speakers can’t do it justice. I also recommend you try to get your hands on a copy of the soundtrack; Taito released a version as early as 1987, fully aware of its significance. I included a gameplay video of “Chaos” to showcase the music in action, but a playlist of the ost is also available. (Youtube link removed due to threats by Square Enix.) You can find full gameplay videos of each level with music on youtube thanks to *censored*.

***Video removed due to Square Enix’s corporate bullying.***

“The Sea” might be the most eclectic song in the mix. It’s certainly my favorite. You quickly discover that it does not intend to be a typical aquatic theme when the demented chime tones come into play. The next transition back to relative normalcy is quickly derailed by an erratic explosion of mechanized blast beats, and Hisayoshi Ogura wraps it all up in fittingly weird form with what feels like some sort of proto-dubstep.

Taito knew they were kings of the arcade. Their house band, Zuntata, even went so far as to perform some of the Darius soundtrack live.

***Video removed due to Square Enix’s corporate bullying.***
Chaos, performed live by Zuntata

A lot of game developers had “house bands” in the early days. This is part of why it is difficult to attribute authorship to a lot of game soundtracks of the era. Taking a closer look at these bands could prove pretty interesting–perhaps another task for another summer. Hisayoshi Ogura was not the first video game composer to perform his material live. I believe that credit goes to Koichi Sugiyama. But this concert, dated to 1990, has to be among the first.

Darius–a 1986 video game music masterpiece. Considering how easily it might have slipped by me unnoticed, I have to wonder how much more I am leaving behind.

VGM Entry 02: Early arcade music

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 02: Early arcade music
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Few early games had music mainly because they were better off without it. The music of Rally-X was certainly an enhancement to the gameplay, but if it really showcases the best technology of the day then it’s easy to understand why most programmers didn’t bother. New technology came fast though, and Rally-X was hopelessly outdated in a matter of months. Carnival (Sega, 1980) is often credited as the first game to employ any of the new and improved sound chips for continuous music, but this claim amounts to little. All of the arcade developers took advantage of the advancements as quickly as they were able.

That’s why you get games like New Rally-X (Namco, February 1981), released less than a year after the original. Video game music immediately emerged in fully developed form the moment it became an option; it didn’t really take any market research to recognize that this would enhance the product.

From 1981 on, arcade music sounded pretty decent. Certainly a lot of games suffered from bad compositions, but many did try, and the work here becomes a simple matter of listening to everything and picking out the best. Arcade games had a unique advantage in this regard. Being self-contained systems, every new game had the opportunity to employ the newest technology on the market. This was seldom the case with computer games, and never the case on home consoles. A pretty massive disparity in sound quality would continue to distinguish arcade music from all of the competition up through the end of the 1980s, when the arcade began to die out as a viable source of revenue for game producers.

The indisputable king of arcade music was Taito. They backed up their claim to being the first, with Space Invaders in 1978, by maintaining a higher standard of quality than most of the competition. Jungle King (1982) is one of my favorite early examples. Here the music isn’t just a nice added feature; it’s the game’s entire selling point. The player feels compelled to keep moving, driven by a sense of urgency and adventure that would be completely absent otherwise. The sound effects make an effort to acknowledge the music’s dominance, seldom clashing and, with the hero’s footsteps on the rock-dodging stage, even roughly synching up to add another layer of depth to the music.

Jungle King has kind of a funny history. The form you are seeing here never made it far out the door before the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs won a lawsuit for copyright infringement on Tarzan. Having already tossed out a beta version called Jungle Boy, Taito recouped their losses by replacing the Tarzan character with a creepy explorer in a pith helmet and safari outfit and retitled the game Jungle Hunt. Never really satisfied with this conversion, they went back to the drawing board again after the release, replacing the explorer with a pirate. Pirate Pete became the forth and final installment of the game, featuring new graphics and a new soundtrack but the same old mechanics.

Konami may have been Taito’s driving force, persistently one-upping them. Gyruss (Konami, 1983) is a real audio masterpiece. Rally-X and Space Invaders both had tonal sound effects, and in the latter ‘sound effects’ and ‘music’ were one and the same entity. Gyruss might be seen as a sort of climax to this trend of music-sound effects-gameplay synthesis.

J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, might seem like an odd choice at first glance, but it had recently been converted into a rock and roll hit by the U.K. band Sky, so it certainly had some pop culture appeal. The significance here though is how well the game is paced to the music, or vice versa. Enemies appear almost on cue, and every sound effect is perfectly attuned to the background music. Really, to call it ‘background music’ at all does it a disservice. Gyruss has a very distinct song, but though the music and sound effects can be easily separated, in practice they are essentially indistinguishable.

What’s most impressive to me is that I really doubt the synthesis is programmed. It would become common enough in the future to sync up music to game events fluidly (consider the added music layer in Super Mario World when you mount Yoshi) and vice versa (the Guitar Hero series and many other games like it are based around the concept), but that’s all written into the code. In Gyruss the cues are apparent, not encoded reality. It tricks our senses, like a fine painting, and indeed it should be regarded as an interactive audiovisual work of art.

VGM Entry 01: Proto-game music

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 01: Proto-game music
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I woke up one morning in June with a fairly innocent idea in mind. I thought I’d write up a short series on my favorite video game soundtracks. It would be a simple enough venture. I’d give a background post on the pre-Nintendo era, then do a little recap of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, all that jazz, and then before I know it be firmly rooted in my SNES/Playstation-era comfort zone, free to recap the two dozen or so games I like best without much interference.

It was a really terrible plan. The shear quantity of material I found myself obligated to cover to even reach my timeframe of interest was daunting, and even then, what could I really say about it? Video game music isn’t some even playing field with linear stylistic evolutions, where everything possesses an equal opportunity for aesthetic value and accessible histories lend themselves to easy commentary. First of all, video game music is a business in which artists can’t simply extend their deadlines until they’re fully satisfied with the end product, and second of all, technology is so intrinsic and varied that comparison becomes hopelessly arbitrary.

But good music is good unconditionally. Technological limitations can do nothing to compromise that; uncertainty obscures only the factors which lead to its creation. With that in mind, I will proceed with my little project here. I intend to listen to quite a lot of video game music attentively and share with you that which appeals to me most. I will provide what little history I can along the way, riddled with inaccuracies and technical fumblings, but in the ends it’s just an excuse to indulge my senses.

So, the first place to start is with that predictably loaded question “what was the first video game with music?” Since there exists no agreement on the definition of music, this question cannot be answered, but we can look at the potential candidates.

Gun Fight (Taito, 1975) had music in a very indisputable sense. I only hesitate to call it the first of its kind because the common consensus fails to confirm it as such; I find it frequently referenced as “one of” the earliest examples, but the sources are never sufficiently decisive. This vague conditional might indicate that no one has really thoroughly investigated the matter, or it might be a consequence of contextual displacement ported to Wikipedia and thence diffused. The latter holds quite a bit of weight; Gun Fight is the earliest game I have personally stumbled upon containing indisputable music, granted some questionable claims to the throne precede it.

But let’s carry on with the indisputables first.

Rally-X (Namco, 1980) was the first game with continuous music which we can indisputably regard as such. You’ll note that the music, whatever you may think of it, is clearly distinguished from the sound effects. The hum of the motor in the background is a distinct entity. Rally-X certainly did not inspire background music in video games–it is not historically significant in that sense–but it was the first game to employ it in such a way that no acceptable definition of music could deny its existence as such.

What’s more significant for my interests is the sound effects. The engine audio is interactive, such that the pitch changes depending on the direction in which the player steers the vehicle. This often clashes with the music, but it possesses the capacity to become a part of the music; one could imagine the player making rhythmic turns in pre-determined directions to harmonize the sound effects with the established musical track, or even producing such an outcome by chance for short periods of time. If we factor into our definition of music a performer’s intent then we are treading very thin ice, and if we do not then we may argue that the familiar blips of Pong (Atari, 1972) possess a musical capacity.

Tomohiro Nishikado’s Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) is often distinguished from Rally-X. Wikipedia for instance employs the cop-out of describing the former as the first game with a continuous soundtrack and the latter as the first with continuous background music. This makes sense in so far as the music of Rally-X is distinct from its sound effects and the ‘music’ of Space Invaders is not, but it ignores the complication which the latter brings to light. I mean, it’s really the choice of notes that jeopardizes the classification of Space Invader‘s sound effects as music; it just doesn’t illicit much of an emotional response in the listener–or at least in me. If Tomohiro Nishikado had shamelessly replicated John Williams’ Jaws in this manner I might never have questioned its musical legitimacy even with half as many notes (and even had I never heard the original). When we begin to define music based strictly on aesthetic value, we again tread on thin ice, but perhaps we venture closer to the truth of the matter.

I’m not trying to beat around the bush here; I’m just humoring myself. I can state in plain terms that Gun Fight is the earliest game I know of that included music, Space Invaders took the first step towards incorporating music continuously into gameplay by giving its sound effects distinctly musical properties, and Rally-X made the final step into video game music as we commonly think of it. These ‘firsts’ aren’t that important anyway, as they were dictated by technological developments rather than artistic innovations.

I just find the whole early development of game sound fascinating in its implications for how music ought to be understood. Computer Space (Nutting Associates, 1971), created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and released a year before Pong, was the first coin-op video game designed for mass distribution, and its sounds possess substantially greater aesthetic value than the earliest attempts at video game music. No no, I’m not going to make some silly argument that it constitutes music, but just how important is ‘music’ anyway? Sound is the stimulus. It would take some time for ‘composer’ and ‘sound programmer’ to become two distinct jobs within the video game industry, and the difference between them is not so obvious as one might initially think.