Japanese Folk Music - Popular Music - Game Music

Game Music

See also: Video game music, Chiptune, and Bitpop

When the first electronic games were sold, they only had rudimentary sound chips with which to produce music. As the technology advanced, the quality of sound and music these game machines could produce increased dramatically. The first game to take credit for its music was Xevious, also noteworthy for its deeply (at that time) constructed stories. Though many games have had beautiful music to accompany their gameplay, one of the most important games in the history of the video game music is Dragon Quest. Koichi Sugiyama, a composer who was known for his music for various anime and TV shows, including Cyborg 009 and a feature film of Godzilla vs. Biollante, got involved in the project out of the pure curiosity and proved that games can have serious soundtracks. Until his involvement, music and sounds were often neglected in the development of video games and programmers with little musical knowledge were forced to write the soundtracks as well. Undaunted by technological limits, Sugiyama worked with only 8 part polyphony to create a soundtrack that would not tire the player despite hours and hours of gameplay.

Another well-known author of video game music is Nobuo Uematsu. Even Uematsu's earlier compositions for the game series, Final Fantasy, on Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System in America) are being arranged for full orchestral score. In 2003, he even took his rock-based tunes from their original MIDI format and created The Black Mages.

Yasunori Mitsuda is a highly known composer of such games as Xenogears, Xenosaga Episode I, Chrono Cross, and Chrono Trigger.

Koji Kondo, the main composer for Nintendo, is also prominent on the Japanese game music scene. He is best known for the Zelda and Mario themes.

Motoi Sakuraba is also another well-known video game composer. He is known for composing the Tales Series, Dark Souls, Eternal Sonata, Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Golden Sun, and the Baten Kaitos games, as well as numerous Mario Sports games.

Yuzo Koshiro is also noted for his work with games, having composed electronic music-influenced soundtracks for games like Revenge of Shinobi and the Streets of Rage series.

The techno/trance music production group I've Sound has made a name for themselves first by making themes for eroge computer games, and then by breaking into the anime scene by composing themes for them. Unlike others, this group was able to find fans in other parts of the world through their eroge and anime themes.

Today, game soundtracks are sold on CD. Famous singers like Hikaru Utada, Nana Mizuki and BoA sometimes sing songs for games as well, and this is also seen as a way for singers to make a names for themselves.