When Computer and Video Games asked Masaya Matsuura in 1997 whether he was more interested in making games or music, he would not choose. “I don’t think of games and ‘others’ having a difference. I want to make fun,” he said. “After I make something, people say ‘it’s a game’ or ‘it’s not a game’. This is the situation with PaRappa. I don’t care about that.” By then he had ten albums behind him with a Japanese pop group, and his first console game, PaRappa the Rapper, had become a hit in Japan. It was the game the next wave of music games was measured against, and Matsuura spent the following decades looking for other ways to make music something a player does.
Fast facts
- Born: 1961, in Osaka.
- Music: ten years in the electronic pop group PSY-S, with the singer Chaka.
- Company: NanaOn-Sha, which made his games.
- Games: PaRappa the Rapper (1996), Um Jammer Lammy (1999), Vib-Ribbon (1999), PaRappa the Rapper 2 (2001), Mojib-Ribbon (2003), Major Minor’s Majestic March (2009), Haunt (2012).
- Recognition: Vib-Ribbon was one of the first fourteen games the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired for its collection, in 2012.
From pop to CD-ROM
Matsuura spent ten years in PSY-S, then wrote music for films and advertising, Edge reported in 1997. He had been composing on computers since 1983, he told Computer and Video Games, and had grown frustrated with the tools: “computer music doesn’t have its own system”, and ready-made software “always sounded the same”. So he wrote his own. “Musicians always use ready-made software, which I find incredibly frustrating,” he told Edge. “I wanted to create something from zero by myself, using tools that nobody had used before. That is why I got into videogame software creation.”
The first result was The Seven Colours (1993), a multimedia CD-ROM for musicians that won a Multimedia Grand Prix that year, followed by two more interactive music titles, Tool-X and Tunin’ Glue. Along the way he built a sampler program on a PC, tried remixing with it, and found rap “very funny to play on the computer. This is the basis of PaRappa’s creation!” He made a prototype of a soundtrack that changed with the player’s performance on Philips’ CD-i, and then, as an artist already signed to Sony Music, asked Sony’s people how the coming PlayStation differed.
PaRappa
PaRappa the Rapper came out in Japan in December 1996, with characters by the American artist Rodney Greenblat. A teacher raps a line and the player answers by pressing the same buttons in time. Matsuura explained the trick behind its sound: “PaRappa doesn’t use midi (internal sound chip), its soundtrack is played on CD. It has four different tracks of the same type, for cool, good, bad and awful.” As the player’s performance changes, one track fades out and another takes its place.
The game won the 1996 CECA Special Judges Award and the Japan Software Special Judges Award, and Edge reported that Matsuura had exchanged his contract with Sony Music for one with Sony Computer Entertainment, which the magazine believed made him the first musician to sign with a games company. Promoting it in Britain at the ECTS show in 1997, he rapped “cool” on a giant PlayStation pad in front of the crowds, and admitted to Computer and Video Games how nervous it made him: “You can’t understand how nervous I am, demonstrating on stage.”
Other designers said what they owed him. Keiichi Yano, whose studio iNiS made Gitaroo Man, told Edge in 2010: “There is no denying that I might not have been doing this if it weren’t for Parappa The Rapper, and I have a great respect for Matsuura-san to this day.”
Lammy and Vib-Ribbon
The next game kept Greenblat’s characters but gave PaRappa’s place to a new heroine. In Um Jammer Lammy (1999), Edge explained, players had to master musical instruments, strumming a guitar to the rhythm, and the music switched to rock.
Vib-Ribbon (1999) went further from the cartoon. Its hero, Vibri, is a stick-figure rabbit drawn in white lines on a black screen, skipping along a single line of ribbon, and the player presses one of four buttons at the right moment to get over the blocks, loops, zigzags and dips in the way. The obstacles follow the music, and the music could be the player’s own. “If you don’t like it, just play your own CD!” PlayStation Power told its readers in 2000. “Try a bit of Moby, Mozart or Metallica and you’ll see what we mean.” Looking back in 2003, Edge called it “a game with soul” that had been “criminally undersupported”. In 2012 the Museum of Modern Art in New York included Vib-Ribbon among the first fourteen video games it acquired for its collection, alongside Pac-Man and Tetris.
Later work
Matsuura kept experimenting with how a player could touch music. Mojib-Ribbon (2003), for the PlayStation 2, turned the rhythm into Japanese calligraphy drawn in time to the beat. In a 2004 interview with Edge he said that what music gave him was a way past words: “with music you can exchange entire images. That’s what’s so great about music. Games are very much the same, they allow me to express myself beyond the use of words.” He also suggested his games looked “a little bit funny, crazy” because he is left-handed, in a world of controllers designed for right-handed people.
Major Minor’s Majestic March (2009), a Wii game in which the player leads a band of animals by waving a baton in time with the music, reunited him with Greenblat. In 2009 he also played live at the GameCity festival in Nottingham; Edge reported that his performances won the festival’s first standing ovation, and that in his lecture he argued for smaller productions involving more people, an idea he called “Poly-Personal Project Direction”. He then designed WINtA, an iPhone rhythm game built by the young Dutch studio Triangle for OneBigGame, a not-for-profit publisher whose games raised money for charity. “How could I hesitate to support something that pulls people together for the betterment of our world?” he said of it. His Kinect game Haunt was published by Microsoft in 2012.
Sources
- Computer and Video Games issue 192, November 1997, p. 101: interview at the ECTS show (his pop career and ten albums; computer composing since 1983; the PC sampler and rap; the CD-i prototype; his Sony Music contract; the four soundtracks; “I don’t think of games and ‘others’ having a difference”; rapping on the giant pad).
- Edge issue 49, September 1997: profile of Masaya Matsuura (Osaka; PSY-S and Chaka; film and advertising music; The Seven Colours, Tool-X and Tunin’ Glue; the 1996 awards; the move from Sony Music to SCE).
- Edge issue 69, March 1999: Um Jammer Lammy preview.
- PlayStation Power issue 56, September 2000: Vib-Ribbon review.
- Edge issue 115, October 2002: Mojib-Ribbon preview.
- Edge issue 130, December 2003: Vib-Ribbon retrospective.
- Edge issue 132, January 2004: interview with Masaya Matsuura of NanaOn-Sha.
- Retro Gamer issue 48 (2008), p. 7: Major Minor’s Majestic March preview (a Wii game; the baton; Matsuura and Greenblat).
- Edge issue 209, Christmas 2009: GameCity report (the live performances, the standing ovation, “Poly-Personal Project Direction”).
- Edge issue 211, February 2010: OneBigGame feature (Matsuura’s quote; Triangle and WINtA).
- Edge issue 213, April 2010: Keiichi Yano of iNiS on PaRappa.
- Edge issue 218, September 2010: WINtA preview.
- Edge issue 253, May 2013: Japanese independent developers, Haunt published by Microsoft in 2012.
- NBC News, “MoMA acquires 14 video games for permanent collection”, 29 November 2012 (web, secondary): the fourteen games, including Vib-Ribbon. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/moma-acquires-14-video-games-permanent-collection-flna1c7342403
- Wikipedia, “Masaya Matsuura” (web, secondary): date of birth; the release years of Mojib-Ribbon and Major Minor’s Majestic March. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaya_Matsuura