The legendary composer behind some of Nintendo’s most memorable music says he’s keen to make another video game soundtrack.
At the recent BitSummit indie game event in Kyoto last month, VGC spoke to Hirokazu ‘Hip’ Tanaka, who indicated his willingness to take on a full project again.
Tanaka is credited as one of the pioneers of chiptune music, having joined Pokémon video games [969 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/games/pokemon/”>Pokémon anime in Japan, Nintendo informed him that he was no longer allowed to do so because it constituted working for another company. As such, Tanaka resigned from Nintendo and joined Pokémon co-owner Creatures Inc, where he eventually became president of the company.
Following his move to Creatures, Tanaka focused less on music – the Japanese version of the Pokémon anime aside – and moved to more of a game production role, only contributing the occasional guest musical arrangement for the Super Smash Bros series. It’s now been more than two decades since he last made a full soundtrack for a game.
Speaking to VGC as part of a full interview which will be posted on the site soon, Tanaka was asked if he was ever interested in making another video game soundtrack, or if he was more interested in other projects now.
Tanaka replied that it’s certainly something he’d like to do, telling us that he had recently getting back into game music production and had contributed a few tracks for recent and upcoming games.
“Actually, if somebody came up to me and said ‘hey, do you want to make music for a game?’ I’d say ‘yeah, sure, sounds like fun’,” Tanaka told us (via an interpreter).
“There’s a studio called 17-Bit making a game called Awaysis, created by a guy called Jake [Kazdal, former Final Fantasy games [324 articles]” href=”https://www.videogameschronicle.com/games/final-fantasy-games/”>Final Fantasy games – is what he would prefer going forwards, or if he would like to try another full soundtrack again.
Uematsu replied that while he’s still getting back into the flow of composing game music again, he feels that he’s at his best when creating a full soundtrack for a game, and it’s something he wants to do.
“Actually, to correct that [previous answer], I didn’t just do one song for Awaysis, I’m doing 70-80% of the game,” he told us. “But I think, for me, I spent my 20s to around 40 or so just making game music, and since then I’ve spent about 20 years where I haven’t really made any, so it’s kind of [about] getting back into it right now.
