PaRappa the Rapper | Code Like It's 198x

In November 1996 Edge toured the Sony stand at a Tokyo games show and picked out “possibly the strangest title on show”: a children’s game in which the player copies “the ever-more complex moves” of a kung-fu teacher who happens to be an onion. Its hero was a dog in a red hat, drawn so flat that he looked cut from paper. A year later the game’s creator, the musician Masaya Matsuura, was being introduced to British readers as the man behind “the rhythm/action game that sent Japan into a PlayStation-buying frenzy last Christmas”. PaRappa the Rapper was not the first game to ask players to keep time with music, but it was the one the genre grew from, and the people who made the next wave of music games said so.

Fast facts

Developer: NanaOn-Sha, Masaya Matsuura’s company.
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment, for the PlayStation.
Creator and composer: Masaya Matsuura.
Characters and art: Rodney Greenblat, an American artist.
Released: Japan, December 1996; Britain, 26 September 1997; North America, November 1997.
Sales: around a million copies in Japan.
Follow-ups: Um Jammer Lammy (1999), PaRappa the Rapper 2 (PlayStation 2, 2001); remade for the PSP (2006) and the PlayStation 4 (2017).

A musician’s game

Matsuura spent ten years in the Japanese electronic pop group PSY-S with the singer Chaka, then wrote music for films and advertising and began making his own music CD-ROMs, starting with The Seven Colours in 1993. He told Edge why: “Musicians always use ready-made software, which I find incredibly frustrating. I wanted to create something from zero by myself, using tools that nobody had used before.” He gave Computer and Video Games a similar account. He had been composing on computers since 1983, but computer music “always sounded the same”, so he wrote his own sampler program for the PC, tried remixing with it, and found rap “very funny to play on the computer”. He built a prototype of a soundtrack that changed with the player’s performance on Philips’ CD-i, then asked Sony how the new PlayStation differed. He was already signed to Sony Music, and after PaRappa he moved his contract to Sony Computer Entertainment; Edge reported that this made him the first musician to sign with a games company.

The characters came from Rodney Greenblat, an American illustrator who had already drawn advertising for Sony. He remembered the team as “Division Zero, where we just did whatever”. His drawings changed the script. “In the case of Chop Chop Master Onion, he was just supposed to be a karate teacher,” he told Gamasutra in 2005, “but the onion thing they just loved, so they changed the whole thing so he was the onion master.” The driving instructor became a moose because “I just thought it would be so funny if she were this big moose, and I was thinking of Queen Latifah in a certain way.”

Kick, punch, rap

PaRappa wants to impress his sweetheart, Sunny, and each of the six stages is a lesson from a new teacher. Chop Chop Master Onion teaches him kung-fu at his dojo; Instructor Mooselini gives him a driving test; Prince Fleaswallow, a reggae-loving frog, helps him raise money at a flea market after he crashes his dad’s car; and Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken shows him how to bake a birthday cake on a television cookery show. The fifth stage is a rap to the front of a queue for the toilet, and the last is a contest at Club Fun led by MC King Kong Mushi.

In each lesson the teacher raps a line, and a bar across the top of the screen shows the PlayStation button symbols that go with it. PaRappa answers by pressing the same buttons in time. A meter rates the performance as “good”, “bad” or “awful”, and the stage changes to match. Computer and Video Games noticed that Master Onion “starts falling asleep if you rap poorly”, and that a bad run at the flea market brings the whole stall down. Stay in “awful” too long and the teacher stops the song and makes PaRappa start again. Players who do better than copy can improvise, and if the meter reaches “cool” the teacher leaves the stage and PaRappa freestyles alone. Finishing a stage in freestyle earns a crown.

The music was not produced by the console’s sound chip. “PaRappa doesn’t use midi,” Matsuura explained. “Its soundtrack is played on CD. It has four different tracks of the same type, for cool, good, bad and awful.” When the game decides the player is no longer doing well, one track fades and another comes in. The pictures were as unusual. The world was built in 3D, but the characters were, in the words of Computer and Video Games, “wafer-thin”, and the camera moved around them “just like a pop video”.

A hit in Japan

The game won the 1996 CECA Special Judges Award and the Japan Software Special Judges Award, Edge reported, and it reached people who did not usually play video games. According to statistics Edge quoted in 1997, 40 per cent of its players were women, which it called “previously unheard-of”. PaRappa himself became a character people dressed up as: at the 1996 Tokyo Game Show, Edge saw fans “walking about in handmade PaRappa hats”. Computer and Video Games reported that he had become a mascot for the PlayStation in Japan. Looking back in 2003, Edge listed the “cuddly toys and McDonald’s endorsements”, and “many PaRappa clubs in Japan run by females”. Greenblat’s memory of the sales was simple: “we sold a million copies in no time, and I was so surprised.”

Coming west

Sony’s British office was not sure. When Computer and Video Games reviewed a Japanese import in March 1997, calling it “the world’s first rap game”, it reported that “Sony UK don’t reckon there’s any market for it”. Sony did release it, and after its release on 26 September 1997 it reached number six in the British all-formats chart. Reviewers loved it but warned that it did not last. Computer and Video Games called it “one of the most original games ever”, but “only six levels, which are relatively easy to finish, means most players could have this at the bottom of their games collection in less than a week”. Still, “Vote PaRappa, and vive la difference!” In America, Game Informer’s reviewer found it “a hilarious game that is truly innovative, but it is also terribly short”. In Edge, Jez San of Argonaut Software called it “one of the most important new games of the last few years” and “the ‘Teletubbies’ of the PlayStation - enjoyed by wasted partygoing Gen X-ers and pre-schoolers alike”. By the end of 1998, though, Edge concluded that it had “failed to sell in the west in quantities anywhere near the levels Sony expected”.

What came after

Other companies followed within a year. Edge found Enix’s Bust a Move (Bust-A-Groove in Europe) “a kind of Parappa the Rappa with polygons” in 1997, and later called PaRappa what “most regard as the first Japanese rhythm action videogame”, the game from which Konami’s Beatmania derived its play. Makers of the next wave of music games said the same. Alex Rigopulos, the head of Harmonix, which went on to make Guitar Hero, told Edge in 2010: “It began with Parappa The Rapper. … it wasn’t the first rhythm-action game, but it was the first great one, and it altered Harmonix’s trajectory.” Keiichi Yano, whose studio iNiS made Gitaroo Man, said that “I might not have been doing this if it weren’t for Parappa The Rapper”. The music games entry follows the genre from there.

NanaOn-Sha’s own follow-up, Um Jammer Lammy (1999), swapped rap for guitar and brought in a new heroine, Lammy. 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 the experimental Vib-Ribbon. A true sequel, PaRappa the Rapper 2, came out on the PlayStation 2 in Japan in 2001, and an animated television series ran in Japan from 2001 to 2002. Sony brought the original back for the PSP in 2006 and 2007, and released PaRappa the Rapper Remastered for the PlayStation 4 on 4 April 2017.

Sources

Edge issue 38, November 1996: Tokyo show report (“possibly the strangest title on show”; Rodney Greenblat; Master Onion).
Computer and Video Games issue 184, March 1997, pp. 46–47: import review (“the world’s first rap game”; Sony UK’s doubts; the rhythm bar, the rap meter, freestyling and crowns; Master Onion falling asleep; “wafer-thin” characters; the pop-video camera; the stages and teachers).
Edge issue 49, September 1997: Sony Computer Entertainment feature (40 per cent of players women) and profile of Masaya Matsuura (PSY-S and Chaka; The Seven Colours; the 1996 CECA and Japan Software Special Judges Awards; the handmade hats at the Tokyo Game Show; his move from Sony Music to SCE).
Computer and Video Games issue 190, September 1997: review (the six stages and their stories; PaRappa as a PlayStation mascot in Japan; “one of the most original games ever”; “only six levels”).
Game Informer issue 54, October 1997: review (“a hilarious game that is truly innovative, but it is also terribly short”).
Computer and Video Games issue 192, November 1997, p. 101: interview with Masaya Matsuura (his computer music since 1983; the PC sampler; the CD-i prototype; the four soundtracks; his Sony Music contract; the Japanese success).
Edge issue 51, November 1997: Bust a Move, “a kind of Parappa the Rappa with polygons”.
Computer and Video Games issue 193, December 1997, pp. 16–21: British release on 26 September 1997 and entry at number six in the all-formats chart.
Edge issue 54, January 1998, p. 83: Jez San’s guest review.
Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998, p. 46: PaRappa’s Western sales.
Edge UK Special Collector’s Edition, 2001: Um Jammer Lammy in retrospect, and Vib-Ribbon.
Edge issue 103, November 2001: review of PaRappa the Rapper 2 (PlayStation 2, Japan).
Edge issue 124, June 2003, pp. 55 and 60: PaRappa as the first Japanese rhythm action game and Beatmania’s debt to it; the toys, the McDonald’s endorsements and the PaRappa clubs.
Edge issue 211, February 2010, pp. 70–71: Alex Rigopulos on PaRappa and Harmonix.
Edge issue 213, April 2010, p. 107: Keiichi Yano of iNiS on PaRappa.
Matthew Hawkins, “Interview: Rodney Greenblat, The Mother Of Sony’s Almost Mario”, Gamasutra, 5 July 2005 (web, secondary): Division Zero, Master Onion, Mooselini, “a million copies in no time”. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/interview-rodney-greenblat-the-mother-of-sony-s-almost-mario
“PaRappa the Rapper”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates in Japan (6 December 1996), Europe and North America, and for the PSP version; Sony’s Platinum Prize in May 1998 for Japanese sales above a million; the television series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PaRappa_the_Rapper
“Parappa The Rapper Remastered comes to PS4 on April 4th”, Engadget, 14 March 2017 (web, secondary). https://engadget.com/2017/03/14/parappa-the-rapper-remastered-ps4-april-4th