I write mostly about urbanism, broadly understood, here. The rest of what I write about is a mix of retail, old tech, consumer issues, bits and pieces of popular or commercial culture and occasionally, as in this post, video games. Video games encompass many of those things, actually, especially older ones that are now played or watched almost entirely via emulation and/or on the internet.

Years ago, I had MAME, an arcade emulation program, on an old, now-defunct computer. Emulation raises copyright issues, of course, but for the vast majority of arcade games, there is no other way to play them or even meaningfully preserve them. I probably tried out hundreds of different games, and there’s one company whose games I still remember pretty fondly: Toaplan, a Japanese software company that specialized in scrolling space-themed shoot-em-ups.

Toaplan’s music is distinctive—it’s thumping, energetic stuff that feels like an embodiment or distillation of an action game. Fans know it as “Toaplan sound.” Awhile ago, I found an interview with the company’s chief music programmer, Tatsuya Uemura, at an old-fashioned video game forum site, which has a huge repository of translated interviews with Japanese arcade industry folks. (Japan dominated arcades in the 1980s and 1990s—that’s one reason arcade game history is a bit obscure in the United States.)

Anyway, the interview is fascinating, all the more because this stuff was behind the language barrier for so long, and because the arcade game industry just about no longer exists. Before I get to the stuff about the music, here are a few interesting bits.

About the social context regarding arcade games early on: “At the time [during Uemura’s first programming job], the game industry was comprised solely of companies making arcade games for game centers, and game centers were thought of as hangouts for delinquents. So game companies weren’t soliciting applications openly.”

Asked whether overseas games influenced Toaplan’s work, Uemura said, “We couldn’t ignore them, but as developers we focused more on games in Japan. The players in Japan and the players overseas had completely different ways of playing, and what they looked for in games was different as well.”

You learn that these games were made by very small teams. There was a lot of creative freedom, along with a lot of constraint due to the limits of the hardware, and the results are often neat and quirky. Video games today, from major developers, are far more attentively and highly engineered. (In the mid-1990s, as video games transitioned to bigger, more expensive 3D productions, a raft of older developers from the arcade and early home console days went bankrupt. In some ways, the increasing complexity of the hardware led to more concentration in the industry.)

There are also some neat bits of video game nerdery here. For example, in shooting games, the player generally has three large bombs that can be deployed to damage a boss or get out of a tough spot. Skilled players generally try not to use the bombs, or use as few as possible, and then very strategically. But Uemura says that when Toaplan pioneered the bomb feature in the 1980s, it was just for the fun of seeing a big explosion. The way the feature ended up being used customarily by players was not at all intended by the programmers.

But the most interesting stuff here to me is about the music, given that I still remember it 15 or 20 years after I first played these games via emulation. Take a look at this exchange:

At Toaplan the programmers had to do all the sound design as well, right?

Uemura: Toaplan as a company didn’t really put much emphasis on sound design, so it felt like something we had to do in our spare time. (laughs) We were working on older hardware than other companies, and from a cost perspective sound was an afterthought.

I’m shocked to hear that (laughs). It was you and Masahiro Yuge who created the “Toaplan style.”

Uemura: That was really just because we didn’t have enough people to work on the games besides the two of us. (laughs)

Here are a few more things Uemura said about music programming at Toaplan:

If I listen to Konami or Sega’s music outside of the game, I still really enjoy it, but when I hear the music I wrote apart from the game, it sounds really lonely, cheap, and embarrassing. From a technical standpoint I think we definitely weren’t on a very high level, and I personally can’t believe how many fans we still have, and how passionate they are about the music.

And:

Everything was the result of trial and error for me. To the end I never felt like I had mastered the tricks of creating sounds and textures. I never went beyond the level of just experimenting with different sounds until I would find something interesting.

It would sure sound cool if I told you something like “we had to walk our own path,” but the truth is, we just weren’t capable of doing anything else. (laughs)

The Toaplan hardware—which resembled that of the Sega Genesis home console—could have a tinny, metallic sound to it, and was not very good at producing moody, orchestral tunes. But in the right hands, it could approximate the grungy twang of an electric guitar, and its rough edge was perfect for shooting and action games.

Uemura’s lack of pride in his old arcade music is so interesting to me, given how good I and many others think it is. The way he talks about programming music for a small company back then sort of reminds me of writing without an editor. Uemura made music basically on his own—a really talented guy who had a lot of freedom to do his thing and not have it refined by someone above him. There are pros and cons to that.

A lot of the tunes in Toaplan games are similar-ish, but they’re full of interesting bits and pieces, sometimes surprising, sometimes discordant. It’s complex and layered without being noisy. It practically begs you to tap your feet. On the one hand, it’s a kind of rough and unrefined talent that might have been so much more. On the other hand, it’s something raw that in a different professional context we might not have seen.

The notion of video games as art—or really as anything more than commercial ephemera—is sort of controversial. A lot of video games were doubly derivative—based on movies or other pop culture which itself drew on “higher” sources or themes. But anything which refines and hones something with real skill is a kind of art, or at least a craft.

And it’s interesting that emulation and the internet have made it possible to deconstruct and crack open these obscure pieces of cultural production. In the old days, you had to actually beat the game to see and hear the whole thing—which, given the difficulty levels of arcade games, very few players ever did. Now you can hop on YouTube and watch a playthrough, or listen to the entire soundtrack. It’s kind of uncanny, and really cool, to see those bits and pieces separated out.

You can even see the names of the tracks—one game’s high-score/name-entry music is called “Requiem,” another’s “Eternal Life.” Some of the names are Japanese— “Tsugaru” or “Secret of Ogiwara.” Others don’t mean all that much but sound cool: “Jumping Roll,” “Flower of Victory.” (I assume those are translations from original Japanese names.)

It’s interesting to imagine a small programming crew sitting around, trying to come up with names for dozens of similar two-minute music loops. Looking at all of this today, in a form nobody could have foreseen at the time, is the best of what the internet can be.

Anyway, you want to hear some, right? Here are probably my four favorites from Toaplan’s/Uemura’s body of work. The first two are from a 1989 horizontal space shooter called Hellfire. The last two are from a 1990 vertical mech shooter called Outzone. If I put these on in the car, I feel like I’m piloting a space ship.

The break from level to level is minimal, as many of these themes have the same beat. It’s kind of a riff on a DJ mixing songs at a dance. Art or not, we can definitely see the creation and evolution of culture here. It’s really fascinating. And the music is good.

Related Reading:

Arcade Games: Art Not Meant to Be Seen

The Japanese Arcade Game That Predicted “Tough on Crime”

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