NanaOn-Sha’s name means “seven sounds”, and the company has always been a musician’s workshop first. Masaya Matsuura had spent ten years in the Japanese pop group PSY-S and was making music CD-ROMs when he set it up in 1993. Its first game, PaRappa the Rapper (1996), had a cut-out paper dog rap along with an onion kung-fu master, and the designers of the music games that followed said it was where they started. NanaOn-Sha never had another hit that size. What it did instead was keep finding new things for a player to do with music: play a guitar, run along a line drawn by a favourite CD, write calligraphy to a beat or wave a conductor’s baton.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1993, in Tokyo, by Masaya Matsuura, who runs it.
- Name: 七音社, “seven-sound company”.
- PlayStation games: PaRappa the Rapper (1996), Um Jammer Lammy (1999), Vib-Ribbon (1999).
- PlayStation 2 games: PaRappa the Rapper 2 (2001), Mojib-Ribbon (2003), Vib Ripple (2004).
- Later games: Tamagotchi games for Bandai on the Nintendo DS, Major Minor’s Majestic March (Wii, 2009), Haunt (Xbox 360, 2012, with Zoë Mode).
PaRappa
Matsuura told the Japanese site AUTOMATON in 2017 that he set up NanaOn-Sha around 1993, when work on PaRappa was beginning. The game came out in Japan in December 1996, published by Sony, with characters by the American artist Rodney Greenblat. A teacher raps a line and the player answers with the same buttons in time; the music, played from CD, switches between versions as the player does better or worse. Edge reported in 1997 that 40 per cent of its players in Japan were women, which it called “previously unheard-of”. The PaRappa the Rapper entry tells its story.
Lammy and Vib-Ribbon
Um Jammer Lammy (1999) kept Greenblat’s world but swapped rap for rock: its heroine, Lammy, plays guitar, and the player strums to the rhythm. Edge later wrote that it “met with critical admiration but (unsurprisingly) little commercial success in the UK”, and that the series’ popularity in Japan let NanaOn-Sha make something stranger.
That was Vib-Ribbon (1999). Its heroine, Vibri, is a rabbit drawn in a few white lines on a black screen, running along a single ribbon of line. Loops, blocks, zigzags and pits appear in time with the music, and the player presses the matching button to get past each. The music could be the player’s own. As PlayStation Power explained, the game was stored in the PlayStation’s memory, so the player could swap in any audio CD and the course would be built from it. “If you don’t like it, just play your own CD!” PlayStation Power told its readers. In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York chose Vib-Ribbon as one of the first fourteen video games in its collection.
On the PlayStation 2
PaRappa the Rapper 2 (2001) brought the dog back, with a noodle-obsessed villain and a new chance to retry a failed section at once. Edge found it fun but “much, much easier”, and wondered how buyers would take “a series that seems so reluctant to evolve”.
The Ribbon games kept experimenting. Mojib-Ribbon (2003) asked players to brush Japanese calligraphy with the analogue stick in time with the music. Edge later called it “one of the most creative music games from the genre’s father”, but its reliance on kanji made it “a purely domestic proposition”, and it stayed in Japan. Vib Ripple (2004) took photographs instead of CDs: players loaded pictures from a digital camera, and Vibri bounced across them as if they were trampolines to shake loose hidden creatures. Edge liked the idea but found the levels the same every time and the game “compromised and rushed”.
Later work
In 2005 Edge noted that NanaOn-Sha’s next game was “a licensed kids’ game”: a Tamagotchi shop-running game for Bandai on the Nintendo DS, Tamagotchi no Puchipuchi Omisecchi. Its reviewer admired the art but found the tasks repetitive, “more like sweatshop labour than whimsical entertainment”. More Tamagotchi games for the DS followed.
The studio’s later games returned to music and performance. Major Minor’s Majestic March (2009) for the Wii had the player lead a marching band by waving the controller like a baton, and reunited Matsuura with Greenblat. Haunt (2012), a “family-friendly ghost tour” for Microsoft’s Kinect made with the studio Zoë Mode, starred Tim Schafer’s voice as its spectre-in-chief; Edge found it gentle and “rarely frustrating” but robbed “of any kind of internal rhythm”. The Masaya Matsuura entry covers his other projects, including the iPhone game WINtA.
Sources
- “音楽ゲームの始まり『パラッパラッパー』開発秘話、松浦雅也氏インタビュー”, AUTOMATON, 17 May 2017 (web, secondary): Matsuura on setting up NanaOn-Sha around 1993. https://automaton-media.com/articles/interviewsjp/20170517-46771/
- Edge issue 49, September 1997: Sony Computer Entertainment feature (40 per cent of PaRappa’s players women) and profile of Masaya Matsuura.
- Computer and Video Games issue 192, November 1997, p. 101: Matsuura interview (the CD soundtrack in four versions).
- Edge UK Special Collector’s Edition, 2001: Um Jammer Lammy in retrospect, and Vib-Ribbon.
- PlayStation Power issue 56, September 2000: Vib-Ribbon review (“just play your own CD!”; the game held in the PlayStation’s memory).
- Edge issue 103, November 2001: PaRappa the Rapper 2 review.
- Edge issue 115, October 2002: Mojib-Ribbon preview.
- Edge issue 231, September 2011: Mojib-Ribbon retrospective (“a purely domestic proposition”).
- Edge issue 139, August 2004: Vib Ripple review.
- Edge issue 156, December 2005: Tamagotchi no Puchipuchi Omisecchi review (Bandai, DS).
- Retro Gamer issue 48 (2008), p. 7: Major Minor’s Majestic March preview.
- Edge issue 238, March 2012: Haunt review (Microsoft; NanaOn-Sha and Zoë Mode; Tim Schafer).
- NBC News, “MoMA acquires 14 video games for permanent collection”, 29 November 2012 (web, secondary). https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/moma-acquires-14-video-games-permanent-collection-flna1c7342403
- Wikipedia, “NanaOn-Sha” (web, secondary): founding year; the Tamagotchi DS games; the release years of Vib Ripple, Major Minor’s Majestic March and Haunt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NanaOn-Sha
- Wikipedia (Japanese), “七音社” (web, secondary): the company’s address in Shibuya, Tokyo, and Matsuura as its representative director. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/七音社