The first Pokémon games had to fit their music into three sound channels. The Game Boy has four, but Pokémon Red and Green used one of them, the noise channel, for sound effects, so Junichi Masuda wrote every melody and bass line with the other three. “As a result, I set the rhythm using bass sounds,” he explained. “Not only that, but since memory was so limited, I ended up repeating a lot of musical intervals over and over again to save space.” He also wrote the program that played it. Masuda had joined Game Freak as a composer when it began making games in 1989, and he stayed for 33 years, directing the main Pokémon games for more than a decade.
Fast facts
- Born: 12 January 1968, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.
- Game Freak: a founding member, from 1989 to May 2022; latterly a managing director.
- Composer and programmer: Mendel Palace (1989), Pokémon Red and Green (1996).
- Director: Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire (2002) to Pokémon X and Y (2013); then Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! (2018).
- Since June 2022: Chief Creative Fellow at The Pokémon Company.
Game Freak’s composer
Masuda met Satoshi Tajiri when he was 19 and studying computer graphics at a technical college in Tokyo. Tajiri was then turning his fanzine, Game Freak, into a developer, and Wireframe names Masuda, “designer and composer”, alongside the artist Ken Sugimori as one of the collaborators who made that happen. Tajiri asked him to score one of the studio’s first games, Mendel Palace, a puzzle game for the Famicom released in 1989.
Game Freak was small, and Masuda did more than write tunes. The in-game credits of its Mega Drive games show the range. On Magical Taruruto-kun (1992) he is credited with “Music, Sound Effects, Sound Program”. On Pulseman (1994), directed by Sugimori and Tajiri, he is listed twice, under “Program” and “Music & Sound Effects”.
Pokémon Red and Green
Pokémon took about six years to make, and Masuda wrote its music while the game was still being built. As The Ringer put it in 2018, he was not given finished scenes to score and had to guess what each sequence would look like. He gave the music a job beyond accompaniment. The game’s region, Kanto, was based on the part of Japan with the same name, “but I went out of my way to avoid using traditional Japanese music for the game in order to make it feel like a completely new world.”
He is credited as one of the programmers of Red and Green as well as the composer. Asked later about the series’ emphasis on trading and battling with friends, Masuda gave the thinking behind it:
People say that when you play videogames, you’re usually playing on your own, so we wanted to create an experience where you can play the game but still play together with friends at the same time and all have fun.
His method of composing, he told Game Informer in 2014, starts away from any instrument. “I can’t play the piano to try and come up with a new sound, for example. Often, I think of the melody first, and then come up with the bass and the drums all in my head. Sometimes I’ll have the whole song in my mind and I’ll just sit down at the computer and all I have to do is enter it in.” He also kept a rule about the battle music: “In Pokémon, it’s not a battle between Trainers – it’s a battle between Pokémon.” Because the player might end up catching and befriending a wild Pokémon, its battle theme must not sound “too scary or dangerous”. Among his own favourites were the short melody in the opening sequence, the title music, the Pewter City theme and, from a later game, Cynthia’s theme. “I probably wouldn’t be able to make them now,” he said. “It’s kind of like when you’re making food and it turns out amazingly well, but you can never reproduce it.”
Director
On Pokémon Gold and Silver (1999) Masuda was assistant director, and wrote music again with Go Ichinose. Tajiri then moved to the role of executive producer, and Masuda directed the series’ third generation, Ruby and Sapphire (2002) for the Game Boy Advance. He has called it the hardest of the Pokémon games he worked on. “After Gold and Silver came out, it was a huge hit around the world,” he told Game Informer, “but shortly after everyone was saying, ‘That’s it. The Pokémon fad is over! It’s dead!’” On the morning after the new games came out he went to a local shop and was relieved to find a queue. “We at Game Freak took that as a challenge and said, ‘It’s not dead. We’re going to show you guys you’re wrong!’”
He went on directing: Diamond and Pearl (2006) on the Nintendo DS, Black and White (2010), and X and Y (2013) on the Nintendo 3DS. He usually still wrote some of the music. “I have served as the director of the Pokémon video game series, starting with Pokémon Ruby Version and Pokémon Sapphire Version, up until Pokémon X and Pokémon Y,” he said in 2022.
Pokémon Go and after
Masuda also worked on Pokémon Go, the 2016 location game for phones made with Niantic. When it was announced in September 2015 he wrote on his blog that he was involved in “the construction of its world view and for its game design and music”. In 2018 he told the official Pokémon website: “I was the one who worked on the base game concept document for Pokémon Go.” That was why he directed Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Let’s Go, Eevee! (2018) for the Nintendo Switch, which were designed to connect with the phone game. He said then that it was “probably… the last time that I work as the director” of a main Pokémon RPG: “it’s important to have the younger generation at Game Freak take over.”
On 31 May 2022 Masuda stepped down as a managing director of Game Freak, and on 1 June he became Chief Creative Fellow at The Pokémon Company, working on new products and services for the brand. “Going forward,” he said, “I hope to transcend the boundaries of video games by trying to offer greater surprises, fun and excitement to people all over the world.”
Sources
- Claire McNear, “The ‘Pokémon’ Invasion, 20 Years Later”, The Ringer, 27 August 2018 (web, secondary): Masuda’s age; meeting Tajiri at 19 as a computer graphics student; Mendel Palace; scoring without finished visuals; the Game Boy’s channels and his quotation on bass and memory; Kanto; Tajiri as executive producer and Masuda as director of Ruby and Sapphire; his Game Informer quotations on Ruby and Sapphire. https://www.theringer.com/2018/08/27/video-games/pokemon-junichi-masuda-20-year-anniversary
- Wireframe issue 15, May 2019, “Developer Profile: Game Freak”: Sugimori and Masuda, “designer and composer”, as the fanzine’s collaborators.
- Retro Gamer, 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die (bookazine), entry 58, Pokémon Red & Blue: interview with Ken Sugimori and Junichi Masuda (six years; multiplayer).
- Casey, “Interview With Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda Reveals His Composing Process, Favorite Pokémon Track”, Siliconera, 19 July 2016 (web, secondary), quoting Game Informer’s interview of 13 May 2014: how he composes, his favourite tracks, the battle music. https://www.siliconera.com/interview-game-freaks-junichi-masuda-reveals-composing-process-favorite-pokmon-track/
- Sega Retro, Magical Taruruto-kun (Mega Drive) and Pulseman (web, database): in-game staff credits. https://segaretro.org/Pulseman
- Nick Santangelo, “Pokemon Let’s Go Is ‘Probably’ the Last Pokemon Game Junichi Masuda Will Direct”, IGN, 1 November 2018 (web, secondary): assistant director on Gold and Silver; director from Ruby and Sapphire; the Pokémon Go concept document; Let’s Go. https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/11/01/pokemon-lets-go-is-probably-the-last-pokemon-game-junichi-masuda-will-direct
- Junichi Masuda, Hidden Power of Masuda (his Game Freak blog, English edition), post 244, 14 September 2015 (web): his work on Pokémon Go; profile with date and place of birth. http://www.gamefreak.co.jp/blog/dir_english/
- Sal Romano, “Junichi Masuda leaves Game Freak, appointed The Pokemon Company chief creative fellow”, Gematsu, 1 June 2022 (web, secondary), quoting The Pokémon Company’s announcement: founding member of Game Freak; managing director until 31 May; the games he directed; his statement. https://www.gematsu.com/2022/06/junichi-masuda-leaves-game-freak-appointed-the-pokemon-company-chief-creative-fellow
- Game Freak, “GAME FREAK Secret Base for GAME FREAK’s 30th Anniversary”, 2019 (web): Masuda as “one of the founding members of GAME FREAK and music composer for many of their titles”. https://www.gamefreak.co.jp/town/30th/en/
- Wikipedia, “Mendel Palace”, “Pokémon Red and Blue”, “Pokémon Gold and Silver”, “Pokémon Diamond and Pearl”, “Pokémon Black and White” and “Pokémon X and Y” (web, secondary): staff credits (composer and programmer on Red and Green; composers on Gold and Silver; directors of the later games); Mendel Palace’s 1989 release.