Published in Arcadia Issue 97 (June, 2008). Roundtable discussion of the soon-to-release (at the time of the interview) soundtrack for Arika’s 2002’s arcade music game Technic Beat. Includes both Arika staff and composers from SuperSweep.
In honor of the release of the Technic Beat soundtrack, the original composers have gathered at Arika! It’s actually been 6 years in the making behind closed doors!? The staff tell us about the difficulties they faced releasing the soundtrack, as well as their memories from the release of the arcade version.
(from left to right)
Ichirou Mihara
Arika
Managing Director, Executive Vice President, Development/Business Unification
Ayako Saso
SuperSweep
Company Director
Shinji Hosoe
SuperSweep
Representative Booze Director
Yousuke Yasui
SuperSweep
Sound Division Head
Hiroto Saitoh
studio MINSTREL
Sound Designer
The long journey to market
– To start with a general question, what was the process of bringing the soundtrack to market like?
Saso: Well, that’s actually the heaviest, most complex part (pained laugh).
All: (laugh)
Mihara: Originally, we asked Namco’s Tatsuro Okamoto and Norio Ishikawa (head of Namco AM Company at the time) around the arcade version’s release, and reached a quick agreement. We were given a lot of freedom in handling it, so once the arcade version was out, we were like “let’s put out a CD!”… but then that’s where the problems started. Hosoe-san can talk about that.
Hosoe: A lot can happen in 6 years…
Saso: The people in charge changed too…
Hosoe: Let’s just say “there were twists and turns to spare”…
Mihara: That’s all!?
PR: It’s just a cool way of saying “it was 6 years of planning” (laughs).
Saso: If you look on Arika’s homepage, there’s still interviews that say stuff like “we’re excited about the soundtrack” (laughs).
– What was the process of making the CD, in a more concrete sense?
PR: Plans for the soundtrack came up over and over, but it wasn’t until June of last year that we brought the plan to Namco. SuperSweep hasn’t published anything from Namco yet, so we thought that this time we would confront them head-on with the plan to make a CD. We expected the song review to take a while due to the amount of music, but in addition to that they had to verify whether the song’s rights belonged to Namco, and who made it, so the investigation period took a ton of time. And finally, around last year’s Winter Comiket (the end of December), we got the green light.
An unexpected blind spot from the passage of 6 years!?
– What song in particular led to the most difficulty?
Hosoe, Saso: Ugh, everything about this CD… (laugh)
Saitoh: The fact that there was a 6 year gap.
Hosoe: It wasn’t really a problem for compiling the CD. It was mostly the negotiation part. Though there were some problems at the end, like missing files (laughs).
Saso: It wasn’t on the hard drive! (laughs) Some things just completely disappeared…
Hosoe: There were things we had to dig out of the depths of our heads as well…
Yasui: There was one where we had to manually mix the backing track data with the game data.
Hosoe: There were some things we never had in the first place. Depending on the case, we would need to prod around dev machines, and there were some things we couldn’t make work with just old data. In the production of Technic Beat, we only made one working demo version, so we ended up making a fairly scattered-about game. But the demo version had a lot of unfinished components, so many things sound different between it and the final version.
Yasui: But it’s Technic so we made do.
All: (laugh)
Saso: We released the game 6 years ago, and production started a year before that… The three songs that were shown at AM Show, “Rally X”, “Mappy” and “Xevious”, were the oldest.
Mihara: At the AM show, we turned the volume on the cabinet up to full blast. Before the doors opened, Namco staff rightfully set it to a more reasonable level. But then right after the doors opened, we cranked the volume again, took the key, and ran (laughs). But some people ended up gathering to listen to the music, so I was happy.
Troubles, hangups, and ideas of composing
Saso: Did you have any particular style you were shooting for when making songs? Like, Yasui-kun was all-in on Morning Musume at the time, and made a song that was just like that. The Net de Ron song.
Yasui: Huh? (laughs)
Mihara: I never thought in my wildest dreams I’d hear a Net de Ron song in this game.
Yasui: You’re a big fan of it in the original game, right? Like, I like this song, but not so much this song. When you were choosing songs, did you go for popular songs, like first stage tracks? Or just ones you liked?
Saso: Probably the ones I have the best memory of. So I ended up only doing songs from games I played.
Yasui: I had more of a chance to listen to the soundtracks than play many of the games, so a lot of my attachment to the games has been filled in by my imagination.
Hosoe: Thunder Ceptor was specified as being the ending theme. The song is mostly triplets, so I thought it was the only real option.
Saso: It was fun being able to choose which songs we do.
Yasui: I thought songs like Metro Cross were amazing.
Saso: I ended up making that with a sorta incomprehensible tempo at first. The game version and CD version are at a different pitch. It’s probably about a quarter tone higher.
Yasui: The CD version is.
Saso: When the original version of the song was being brought into the game, it turned out I had made a miscalculation. I thought I made the song so it could be properly divided into measures in-game, but then it was like “huh? I got it wrong!?”. So I had no choice but to change the pitch of the in-game version.
Hosoe: I found fitting the songs into a minute and a half was harder than actually arranging them. There were lots of songs we couldn’t include in Genpei Toumaden and Wonder Momo. I got complaints that Momo doesn’t include the post-transformation track. I can’t change the tempo, so it would’ve been hard… I would’ve liked to include it if I could.
PR: Were there no long versions?
Mihara: Only in the first one?
Saso: There were long ones in Technictix, but Beat had a strict minute and a half rule.
Hosoe: There are some songs where it fades out at the end in-game, but I had actually made a bit more.
Yasui: It would’ve been nice to have had long versions. Was it a matter of storage space?
Mihara: No, no, (makes gesture for money) it’s a reality where we can only give people a certain amount of play for 100 yen.
All: (laugh)
Yasui: Gotcha, gotcha (laughs).
For the fans who have waited so long
– And now we’re at the usual part where we give final messages to the readers.
PR: Can we end with everyone naming a favorite song other than their own?
Mihara: Isn’t that kinda strict?
– Then, what’s a song you particularly want people to listen to.
Saso: I’d rather fix my songs than listen to them (laughs). I wanna remake them now (laughs).
Saitoh: It’s like a postmortem (laughs).
Yasui: Let’s go do it now (laughs).
Mihara: Great, let’s put the arrange versions on a luxurious 2-disk set (laughs). 6 years from now.
All: (laugh)
Hosoe: It’d sure be a big help if you could buy three copies (laughs).
Saitoh: These aren’t people who seem like they’re writing songs just for work. There aren’t many CDs with this much love in them in the world, so I think this one is really nice.
Yasui: We wanted to make songs that would stand up with Namco’s originals, so please take a look.
– Thank you for all your time today.
(4/8/08, at Arika’s office)
Extra
[The criteria for song selection]
Mihara: Games where Arika has the board and can take a picture of the title screen! But we didn’t have Thunder Ceptor II, so we needed to go all the way to Shiga prefecture to take a picture of the screen. The shopkeep was an acquaintance of one of our employees, so after negotiations we somehow got them to let us take a picture.
[Games you wanted to arrange music from]
Yasui: There’s lots of songs I really like, but would’ve been difficult to do due to the source game not being well known. Like Knuckle Heads, Mirai Ninja, or Pistol Daimyo.
Mihara: Could you arrange those?
Yasui: (replies confidently) I could. As far as more popular games go, Phelios. It has an orchestrated sound, so it would’ve been difficult and time-consuming to reproduce.