Legendary Nintendo composer Hip Tanaka says he’d ‘love to’ make another full game soundtrack if asked

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 Nintendo in 1980 and worked as an in-house composer during its 8-bit and 16-bit eras, helping to design and program the audio hardware for the Famicom / NES and Game Boy.

Among his credits, Tanaka composed such iconic soundtracks as Super Mario Land, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Balloon Fight, Dr Mario and the Game Boy version of Tetris. He also co-composed the soundtracks for Mother and Earthbound with Keiichi Suzuki.

However, after he started writing songs for the 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 been 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 Sega artist], and I actually made a track for that game. I’m not the only person making music for that game, there’s a bunch of us, but I created a track for it, and I’m playing it tomorrow.”

We asked  Tanaka if creating single tracks for games – in much the same way as Nobuo Uematsu has done for recent Final Fantasy games – is what he would prefer going forwards, or if he would like to try another full soundtrack again.

Tanaka 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.

“I made a song for Street Fighter 6 last year as well, but generally for me, the thing I’m best at as a composer is to have a game theme – a single colour which kind of defines that game – and then design an entire soundtrack, an entire audio experience around that theme.

“So if anybody comes up to me and says ‘hey, can you do this’, I’d be like ‘yes, I’d love to’.