“If you want to make a game, you have to deduct the category of ‘game’”
Coffee and a chat with Japanese musician and videogame developer, Masaya Matsuura
A couple of months ago we spoke to legendary Japanese videogame creator Masaya Matsuura about his visit to the UK and performance at All Your Bass. The mind behind classic PlayStation music videogame PaRappa the Rapper took us through his career, his mission and gives some advice to budding artists!
Chris: Thanks so much for talking to us Matsuura, I’d like to start with asking how you got into creating videogames and videogame music?
Matsuura: To answer your question let me start at the beginning — I’m not a videogame musician as such, I’m a music game designer. I almost never contribute as a musician to compose soundtracks for games. From my position, creating the game and music is an expansion of my territory as a musician.
The most important revolution in my experience, around the seventies, was encountering the synthesiser. Still, it is one of the biggest impacts for me — thinking about music expression — it’s available for unskilled musicians. I tried various kinds of ways to make synthesiser music when I was a teenager.
C: So this is for fun, before you went into it as a career
M: Yes. After then I started my career as a musician, but it was the dawn of the computer age. I loved this technology, the sampling and this new music wave and way of expression. The most iconic example would perhaps be The Art of Noise, for example. They used synthesisers, a collage of sounds recorded into a memory — mixed and repeated, truncated. Having this kind of background, all the time I have to think about the relationship between the music and the computer technologies. Of course in the eighties — especially music technology — experienced a very rapid innovation. This revolution made my job easier, cheaper and provided a more personalisable environment. I started my career with minor music productions, then I signed at Sony Music Records and everything came out from there.
I didn’t want to make ‘static’ music, because I’m always using the computer to compose my music — sampling in the computer, playing back and forth. It’s vital that the computer environment is dynamic for me. But there was a ‘gap’ between the record company and us, some disagreement. The record company’s parent, Sony, decided to expand their business to the multimedia environment. Their most well-known hardware was, of course, PlayStation. I was given a chance to produce something, but at that time we had no idea how to make a game based on music. It looked impossible to make a music game at the time. There was perhaps a quirky appeal to make an interactive audio production, but the game needed to be interesting and fun. The demand was there to make something new from the music industry, so we decided to do an experimental project which we named PaRappa the Rapper.
C: I understand you’ve made a soundtrack for the building — the National Videogame Arcade — could you tell me more about what you’ve done in the building?
M: Several months ago, Iain and James came to Japan to discuss the possibility to participate in All Your Bass. Iain asked me to contribute to make something for the arcade. He wanted me to make the sounds for the announcements. They came to Japan and, listening to many public service announcements in train stations — everywhere in Tokyo there are sounds specific to each public space. Unfortunately, I’m not a huge fan of this — at first I was not a supporter of the Tokyo public sound ‘movement’ but, it might work for you guys!
The sounds announce to guests that an event is on or the arcade is closing, opening etc. I needed to know if it was to be an obvious or subtle message, and James’s answer was obvious. It took me a while to capture the right feeling of the announcement. For the Japanese, every single line — for example, in anime — includes various kinds of emotions in the pronunciation that you don’t need. I used a sample to find the right intonation for the atmosphere. I gave that recording a kind of musical rhythm, breaking up the sentence a creating a music score from the rhythm of the speech, then adding the pitch differences. Different words from the phrase have stronger emphasis, so they might require a higher pitch to make them easier to recognise.
I am an electronic music composer, but I focus on bringing the vocals to the forefront. I decided to use my voice for the final product but mimic the accent most understandable to guests!
C: It sounds like quite a complex process then
M: Yes, but it’s also quite natural to me. It was very important to me to have in depth discussion about even the shortest of musical productions, but people who work will have to listen to these things every day. If they don’t like it, it would be torture. Like for me in Tokyo! So I wanted to do my best.
C: It’s a really interesting project. Could you tell us more about why you are here in the UK and what can we expect from you at All Your Bass?
M: From the beginning of my career, it’s been difficult to work with and communicate with people from a wider population, especially in Japan — specifically the East island. Having the game — PaRappa the Rapper — gave me the opportunity to do that. In the 80s I was isolated and internalised, in the 90s my life was externalised — now I have no difference between internal and external life. The first time I came here, to the UK, was around 1986 and now it makes me feel completely different. We have many more similar social issues now. To move forward and improve, we need to encourage wider activities. Unfortunately culture seems to be closing off somewhat. So I want to try and avoid this type of closing off, by using this chance to reach out.
C: Fantastic. When you started making PaRappa the Rapper, do you think it was really important that you were into gaming? Do you have to be an avid gamer to be involved in creating a game?
M: That’s a good question — I don’t think so. Actually — definitely not! I don’t think it’s good to categorise things as separate. When we started making the game, our gaming knowledge was very limited, most to Nintendo systems. PlayStation wanted to make it more sophisticated and contemporary, but maybe as a PlayStation game, it’s not a game for Nintendo people. The gaming industry is split up into so many different sections — driving games etc — if you want to make a game, you have to deduct the category of ‘game’. People will have different interpretations of what a game is. This is a very attractive part of the game industry. All I wanted to do was make an interactive experience on the PlayStation, and at the end of the production process even people at Sony at the time didn’t recognise PaRappa as a game. It’s just something interactive, experimental and music based. The audience said it was a game, so we had to persuade Sony it was a game!
C: Sometimes having the label ‘game’ is a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. Sometimes perhaps people might not see creating a game as an art — when you’ve created games, who do you do for it for? Do you do it for yourself? Do you have an audience in mind?
M: Of course I had an idea of who I wanted it to appeal to, but it was important to me that the audience should be wide. That’s a very basic mission for me. I want to contribute to resolving social issues, any kind of issue. I also want to be artistic — this is very important to me. Of course innovation is important in making something attractive, but also artistic is an important keyword — creators put themselves into their creation. Those who get into the industry just to make a well-known game more well-known — maybe that doesn’t require so much artistic work.
I appreciate innovation in companies very much — Gucci, for example, has recently changed their design greatly. They can do this because they are established of course. To become more established, especially in the gaming industry, requires time. I want to appeal to younger people in particular, do not forget about artistic influences!
