When Mario jumps in the arcade Donkey Kong, the “boiiing” is Hirokazu Tanaka’s work, and so are the footsteps. He built them from electronic circuits, not from software, and he made the footsteps vary. “With older games, you’d have only one sound effect used over and over,” he explained in 2014. “By using the curve on the charge-discharge of a capacitor, I tried to change the sound according to the timing of his steps.”
Tanaka joined Nintendo as a sound engineer in 1980, before the company had anyone whose job was music. He went on to write some of the best-known music on the Famicom and NES, including the score for Metroid, which almost nobody at Nintendo liked at the time. He helped design the Game Boy’s sound hardware, scored its Tetris, planned the Game Boy Camera, and then left to run part of the Pokémon business.
Fast facts
- Born: 1957. In June 1998 Club Nintendo described him as 40 years old, with 18 years at Nintendo.
- Nintendo: 1980 to 1999.
- Known as: “Hip” Tanaka, after hip-hop; later “Chip Tanaka” for his chiptune performances.
- Music for: Duck Hunt, Wrecking Crew, Balloon Fight, Metroid and Kid Icarus on the NES; Super Mario Land, Tetris and Dr. Mario on the Game Boy; Mother and EarthBound with Keiichi Suzuki.
- Creatures Inc.: joined in 1999, president from 2001 to 2023.
Sound engineer
Tanaka studied electronic engineering at university, and his music got in the way. “My professor once summoned me and said, ‘I understand if you want to make a living with your music, but I just cannot allow you to graduate as an engineer like this’,” he told Gamasutra in 2002. He had learned music at the Yamaha Music School from the age of five, but called his composing “almost entirely self-taught”, and said the music that excited him most was reggae dub.
He answered a newspaper advertisement for a sound engineer at Nintendo. Nintendo, he said in a 2014 lecture, “had happened to be looking for different sounds for toys or something at the time. I thought toys would be relatively stress-free, so I applied.” His first job was the arcade shooting game Space Firebird. “I had to design not only the sound, but to do everything from selecting amps to setting up the speakers for the arcade machine.” The sound for those machines was made in hardware, which is why the Donkey Kong footsteps came from a capacitor. Tanaka said Donkey Kong 3 was “the first game that I did both the hardware and programming myself”.
Writing for the Famicom
When Nintendo turned to the Famicom, its programmers made the sounds. Koji Kondo, hired in 1984 as one of Nintendo’s first music staff, remembered that Tanaka had been writing music alongside his programming work. Tanaka wrote his music straight into the machine: “I always created my own sequencer and used assembly for programming language,” he said. He wanted to reach the hardware directly, because he believed that was how to get the most out of a sound chip “limited to 3 to 4 tones”. The Famicom’s sound hardware gave him two pulse-wave channels, a triangle wave and a noise channel, plus a channel for playing back samples.
His NES credits include Duck Hunt, Gyromite, Wrecking Crew and Balloon Fight. Gyromite and Stack-Up carry his name inside the program code: “ROBOT SOUND 5/5 1985 HIROKAZU.TANAKA”.
Metroid
Most game music of the mid-1980s was bright and hummable. Tanaka set out to do the opposite in Metroid (1986). “I had a concept that the music for Metroid should be created not as game music, but as music the players feel as if they were encountering a living creature,” he told Gamasutra. “I wanted to create the sound without any distinctions between music and sound effects.” He kept a proper melody back until the very end: “the melody in Metroid is only used at the ending after you killed the Mother Brain. That’s because I wanted only a winner to have a catharsis at the maximum level.”
It was not popular with his colleagues. “No one at Nintendo liked the Metroid soundtrack back then,” he said in 2014. “The music was all so dark, it wasn’t well received.” The same year he wrote the music for Kid Icarus. Retro Gamer later called him “the man behind Metroid’s music and highly experienced in working with limited audio architecture”.
The Game Boy
Tanaka was one of the small group at Nintendo who worked on the Game Boy, and he designed much of its sound. In his 2014 lecture he described two of his additions. “With regard to the Famicom, there was only one kind of noise to use,” he said; on the Game Boy “you could choose between two kinds of noise”, the ordinary hiss and “a more cyclical noise that sounded like a ‘beep’ sound”. (The very first Famicom sound chips had only one noise mode; later revisions of the chip added a short, pitched one.) And to make very clipped sounds, “I added new circuits to control sounds shorter than 16 milliseconds.”
He wrote the music for Super Mario Land (1989), working, Retro Gamer noted, in a team led by Gunpei Yokoi rather than Shigeru Miyamoto. For the Game Boy Tetris the same year he took his cue from the version he had seen first: “My sense of Tetris came from seeing it run on Apple computers originally. My image was Tetris on the Mac, and I wanted to maintain that image. But I continuously added my own ideas into it, too.” Dr. Mario followed in 1990.
Mother and EarthBound
Tanaka co-wrote the music for Shigesato Itoi’s role-playing game Mother (Famicom, 1989) with the musician Keiichi Suzuki and others, and the two returned for its Super Famicom sequel, Mother 2, released in America as EarthBound. That game was set in a contemporary world, he explained, and “I couldn’t create music that I’d never heard before, so there were influences from rock, or pop, or even world music.”
The Game Boy Camera
By the late 1990s Tanaka wanted to make things as well as music. “I can’t create a game like Mario or Zelda,” he said, “but maybe I could make something like a toy that everyone could enjoy.” He wondered “if you could hook up a camera to your Game Boy”, and even tested watching television on one. The result was the Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer of 1998, called the Pocket Camera and Pocket Printer in Japan. “Before resigning from Nintendo, I planned and developed Pocket Camera and Pocket Printer,” he told Gamasutra. Club Nintendo interviewed him about the camera for its June 1998 issue.
Pokémon and Creatures
While still at Nintendo he was asked to write theme music for the Pokémon anime. “I never dreamed that Pokemon would become such a hit. I think I just got lucky,” he said. Nintendo did not allow its staff to work for other companies, and in 1999 he left to join Creatures Inc., the company Tsunekazu Ishihara had founded in 1995, which shares the Pokémon copyright with Nintendo and Game Freak. “When I got involved with Pokemon, I got some revenue. It was that simple. That wasn’t the only reason, but I left Nintendo and I was a free man.”
He became Creatures’ president, in 2001 according to Nintendo Life. The company designs the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and in 2014 Tanaka said that new card designs were “the one thing I’ve constantly been doing”. In April 2023 he stepped down as president and stayed on as a “Creative Fellow”. He has also performed as Chip Tanaka, a name a friend overseas suggested: “Why not add a C in front of your name? As in chiptunes.”
Sources
- Alexander Brandon, “Shooting from the Hip: An Interview with Hip Tanaka”, Gamasutra, 25 September 2002 (web; republished by Game Developer): university and the professor, Yamaha Music School, reggae dub, the newspaper advertisement, Space Firebird, the game list, his own sequencer and assembly, the 3 to 4 tones, Metroid’s concept and its melody, Nintendo’s rule on outside work, the Pocket Camera and Pocket Printer. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/shooting-from-the-hip-an-interview-with-hip-tanaka
- “Hip Tanaka”, Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Tokyo, 2014, with Nick Dwyer (web): joining Nintendo in 1980, Space Firebird, the Donkey Kong sounds and the capacitor, Donkey Kong 3, the Game Boy’s noise and short-sound circuits, Metroid‘s reception, Tetris, EarthBound, the Game Boy Camera, the Pokémon anime, leaving Nintendo, Creatures’ card designs, “Hip” and “Chip”. https://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/hip-tanaka
- Club Nintendo (Germany), volume 10, issue 3 (June 1998): Game Boy Camera feature and interview with Hirokazu Tanaka (age 40, 18 years at Nintendo).
- Retro Gamer, issue 32 (2006): Super Mario Land (Tanaka on sound; Yokoi as producer).
- Retro Gamer Collection, volume 4 (2010), “The complete history of Metroid”: music by Hirokazu Tanaka.
- NESdev Wiki, “List of NES music composers” (community reference, web, secondary): Tanaka for Balloon Fight, Duck Hunt, Gyromite, Stack-Up (with the ROM signature), Wrecking Crew, Metroid, Kid Icarus and Dr. Mario; Mother with Akio Ohmori, Ritsuo Kamimura and Keiichi Suzuki. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/List_of_NES_music_composers
- NESdev Wiki, “APU Noise” (community reference, web, secondary): the short noise mode, and its absence from the earliest revisions of the 2A03. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU_Noise
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary, volume 5 (2010, web): Koji Kondo on Tanaka writing music alongside programming before 1984.
- Wikipedia, “Hirokazu Tanaka” (web, secondary): Mother and EarthBound with Keiichi Suzuki; the Game Boy Tetris; his birth year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirokazu_Tanaka
- Ollie Reynolds, “Creatures Inc. Undertakes A Significant Change In Leadership”, Nintendo Life, 5 April 2023 (web, secondary): president from 2001; Creative Fellow. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/04/creatures-inc-undertakes-a-significant-change-in-leadership
- Donovan Erskine, “Creatures Inc. CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara steps down”, Shacknews, 6 April 2023 (web, secondary): Tanaka joining Creatures in 1999 and stepping down as president. https://shacknews.com/article/134957/creatures-inc-ceo-tsunekazu-ishihara-steps-down