Sakimoto's Website
Hitoshi Sakimoto is a Japanese video game composer--not exactly a band in the traditional sense, but in my opinion, he is a gateway to a far more enriching field of music. Sakimoto's career spans many decades leading up to this very day. His inagural work, Revolter on the PC-8801, was released in 1988 when he was only 19 years old. As such, his life and career has now spanned a vast majority of video game history. In that time, video game music has gone from Programmable Sound Generators (PSG) on flimsy sound drivers, to the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), to FM Synthesis, to fully streamed redbook audio, and at some point in his life, Sakimoto has adapted to all of them.
He still earns commissions from pinnacle game developers today, such as Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers by Square Enix With that said, his work predating streamed redbook audio is perhaps what he's most well-known for. Redbook audio coinncided with the birth of CD-ROMs in the late 1980s; however, it didn't become a universal standard for the gaming industry until the turn of the millenium. In that time, composers had to work within the limitations of solid-state cartridges. The standards were radically different for every video game console on the market. Musicians had to learn, re-learn, and re-compose every single song they wrote with little more than a hex editor, and thanks to the cartridge storage limitations of the time, they usually had less than 256KB to work with. That means cramming an entire game's worth of music and sound effects, often spanning more than 45 minutes in length, by yourself in a space often exceeded by individual webpages today. (For reference, this website with 57 lines of code is 7KB.)
Under those intense limitations, most musicians couldn't dream of creating rich melodies--much less orchestral masterpieces--but in his own way, Sakimoto approximated his music with nothing short of majestic programming.
Magical Chase (PCE - 1991) - Waltz of Meditation Part 2
Sakimoto's artistic stylings always had a knack for the illusive and fantastical, and this piece from Magical Chase captures that spirit in more ways than one. The PC Engine, Magical Chase's native hardware, only has six channels of PSG wavetable audio with support for mere Pulse-code modulation (PCM) samples, and given that this is still playing on top of sound effects in the context of the game, it goes without saying that making PC Engine music is a tough balancing act. With that said, this piece manages to pull off a rich melody in flying colors. It trounces the senses using a progressive rock flare enfused with high fantasy values. All of this fits neatly in a HuCard that's half of a Megabyte in size, and spritework and game logic hogs a vast majoirity of that space. That HuCard, by the way, adds to the song's illusive tone. The game was distributed in the United States in extremely small numbers, and original copies often sell for thousands.
Gauntlet IV (SMD - 1993) - Transparent Obstacle
Grass was greener on the Sega Mega Drive--a competing platform from around the same time. Its Yamaha YM2612 FM Synthesizer is one of the most famously versitile sound chips ever made, and it was helped by an additional ZiLog Z80 processor used for compatibility. In total, the Sega Mega Drive had 10 sound channels with six being for FM Synthesis and four being for PSG. Notably, it was also one of the first machines to widely support stereo sound. Early revisions of the console even have a built-in headphone jack! In Gauntlet IV's case, stereo sound and FM Synthesis pitch modulation are the heart and mind of the tone. This song expertly demonstrate's Sakimoto's brilliant ability to set a mood despite utterly arcane resources. Most of this song is spent dwelling on unnatural, mystical, and foreboding noise owing to the game's high fantasy setting. Only after a full minute of buildup are we exposed to an identifiable melody. Sakimoto's ability to work toward a crecendo would eventually become a signature trademark.
Opoona (WII - 2007) - Partizans
As a friendly reminder, Sakimoto was in his early 20s when he composed the above two songs using tools that would take most of us a lifetime to decrypt in the 21st century. Now that his status as a prodigy has firmly been established, let's jump foreward to his music in a post-soundchip world. In his late 30s as a traditional music director working for a well-established company (Koei Tecmo) with modern tools, samples, and workers, Opoona on the Nintendo Wii is perhaps the best example of his musical motifs without limits. His ability to work towards a strong melody using seemingly unrelated chords is more evident than ever. His illustration of almost contradictory emotions--whimsy, scope, mystery, and fantasy--are still firmly planted in the listener's mind. His overall penchant for turning his music into a sensory journey, above all else, has never been lost. In fact, with the vast modern resources at his disposal 33 years into his very diversified career, his style has only grown more vivid with time.