To commemorate the release of the Tokeijikake no Aquario official soundtrack, here's an interview with composer Shin-ichi Sakamoto (of Westone Bit Entertainment).
The Making of the Aquario Soundtrack
A mysterious 3-players simultaneous game that ended up being unreleased.
Harry (the interviewer): Let's start by asking what kind of game Aquario was going to be like?
Sakamoto: It was going to be similar to Monster Lair. It was going to be a forced side-scrolling game, but with a bit of a cooperative multiplayer mode. It was originally going to be a 2-players game, but then we decided to add a third player as well. The three characters consisted of a boy (named Hack Rondo), a girl (Elle Moon), and a robot (Gash). The method of attack was by stomping on enemies and then grabbing them to throw them out. Oh, I think you could even catch enemies thrown by other players as well or something like that. You could even head butt thrown enemies thrown at you. (laughs)
H: Can you explain the "clockwork" (Tokeijikake) part of the title? I'm really anxious to hear...
S: What is it you mean? ... Well, originally I think there was going to be a clockwork motor that also served as our time limit system... (laughs) I really wish I could tell you more, but I don't remember that much. Ah, wait, I remember the game was originally going to be called "Ghost Hunter" (laughs).
H: It's been 13 years (as of this interview) since the game was canceled and no source code or board has ever been found, although it might still be out there. Did it ever went through a limited release during the location testing phase?
S:It seems it went through such a phase, but I believe not many played it.
For the download soundtrack, the original character designer Mina M. drew an all-new illustration for the cover jacket. From down to up, we can see the game's heroes, Hack Rondo, Gash, and Elle Moon. Above them is a goldfish equipped with a clockwork spring, who appears to be the "Aquario" of the title...
An unexpected connection with Manabu Namiki.
H: But there were people who played through the location test version and spoke highly of the game. In fact, composer Manabu Namiki has told stories of playing the game during location testing.
S: Are you serious? Ah, now that you mention it, I was talking to Mr. Namiki today about unrelated matters and now that I remember, I discreetly gave him the music data from Aquario around that time. I can tell you that I converted the GS sound source file made with "Recomposer" into ISH files, they were in PC-VAN format I think, and then I delivered the files online. At least that's what I recall (laughs).
H: That sounds like another interesting story. (laughs) It seems the sound data originally produced in GS sound source after all. If that's the case, could there be a MIDI version of the soundtrack as well?
S: No, I didn't find any MIDI tracks in the leftover data I extracted from "Recomposer".... At least that's what I think. (laughs) However, I did find a floppy disk today labeled the "Aquario Sound Master File". However, I've tried to access the disk, but I can't read it since it's for a PC-9801 with a three-mode floppy disk drive. I got a feeling that there's something of value inside. (laughs)
H: Well, this firm has companies such as Project EGG that specialized in releasing numerous old video games on PC and right now they have numerous PC-98 games available. Please allow us to help you in preserving the disk's data. (laughs) On a related note, had you ever been acquainted with Mr. Namiki before that moment?
S: No, I never talked to him prior to our recent exchange. However, Namiki was an old classmate of a member of Westone's sound team who did the music for Riot City and Monster World IV (Jin Watanabe perhaps? - ed), so I knew about him very well due to his connection with our company. He used to come to our company to play as well.
The Final Purpose of Aquario
S: The sound staff of Westone were an incredibly wonderful group to be with. There were two other guys besides myself and the aforementioned classmate of Namiki.
H: I see. People sometimes have the impression that you, Mr. Sakamoto, was composer working for Westone.
S: That's not true at all. The others were probably more talented than me. No, I'm serious. (laughs)
I always questioned my decision whether I should have ever transferred from my studies of engineering to this industry. But everyone else in the division wanted to make music in the first place and they intentionally chose the game music industry. I feel completely embarrassed since I studied something completely different, but ended up making music on CD-DA. I had unlimited potential for my skills, but I ultimately never did anything with it (laughs), so I ended up having no use for my studies (laughs).
In the end, the quality of my work depends very severely on what kind of equipment I have.
Even though I made a few game soundtracks with CD-DA, I never fully understood how the format works.
H: A genuine chip musician (laughs). With that in mind, was Aquario Mr. Sakamoto's final substantial work?
S:When I was working on Aquario, I always felt it was going to be our final arcade game. The marketplace started shifting towards home consoles by that point and if we had continued making arcade games, I don't we would had been around for much longer.
H: The master tape for Aquario is dated August 14, 1993. That was during the fighting game boom, so it was definitely a severe marketplace to release a game like Aquario at that point.
S: That's right. The location test was conducted in Shinjuku and Ueno in 1993. Even though I truly wanted the company to release it, we had to cancel it because the game's reception was not good.
The master tape that was used to record the soundtrack. Sakamoto recorded the music from the actual PCB after having the bad premonition that he wouldn't be able to listen to the game's music in the future. He has held on to the tape since then.
Sakamoto's style of House and Acid Jazz music
H: Speaking of the musical aspect. The game's soundtrack has a House-like taste that doesn't feel anything like you did at the time, but at this very moment there seems to a trend towards clubtrack approach towards game music. I think the soundtrack of Aquario would've been noticed, even if the actual game itself would've made little impact.
S: The moment I've first listened to acid jazz and house music, my reaction was "wow, how interesting". J-Wave (a radio station in Japan) used to play house music back then at night. It was a very peculiar feel that you didn't hear often in game music back then, so I wanted the capture the feel in a chiptune, even though I don't think it sounds like house music to me (laughs).
H: I meant it a good way. I think it sounds a lot like house music, but it has a Sakamoto-like feel it. It has a mood very close to Yuzo Koshiro's work on Streets of Rage. That game came out earlier in 1991.
S: I knew of Koshiro, since he was in charge of the music for Hudson's Super Adventure Island, but at that time I wasn't aware he also did Streets of Rage.
If you say it sounds like house, then it probably is (laughs). It's not possible to do much in such ennui mood. Usually if I use a sequencer and synthesizer I might capture such a style, but you're not suppose to do such a thing if you don't want to drown the game's sound.
H: So you put on the brake just in case? I see...
S: The truth is that I'm not very good with rhythm. I have composed without drums for years and most of my music didn't have much rhythm to them, so I didn't know how to give it one. However, even in such a genre, since the same rhythm is used continually, shouldn't it be easy to learn? (laughs)
H: Perhaps you could do it without worrying about the rhythm. (laughs)
S:The data size becomes small as well.
Another theme, Escaping FM sound module.
S: Another theme in Aquario was what could be called an "Escaping FM sound module". I've worked with using an FM sound module since my days at Tecmo, so I was already tired of it by the time I was working on Aquario. That's because when you're using FM, analog sounds won't come out since various parameters of the sound source chip are rewritten while outputting the sounds and noises that usually don't come out because of VCF tampering is emitted. Because of that, CPU interruption is processed on a rate of 1/240 seconds instead of 1/60.
H: It's easy to understand how much sound drivers have evolved from listening to it. The pitchbending (the undulation of sound) is rather peculiar compared to other works that were released until that point.
S: The pitchbend was easy to do. Our driver could achieve the pitchbend for a while back then by using a part of the LFO (vibrato). However, nowadays we use MIDI data and I think we put in the pitchbend information into the data.
H: I noticed that in tracks like "Blast'em up (Boss!!)", sounds effects such as screaming is played during the music.
S: That's right, you could say there are sound effect-like noises in the music, I worked hard with pleasure to put them it.
H: I imagine the ability to produced sound effect-like music has improved to perfection.
S: Nope, not at all. In such driver the same function is used for music and sound effects, so they share the same structure. The sound effect can be called from the sequence data. Therefore you have sound effects that make you go "that sounds awful" if you use for everything. That's why it was a changeable driver.
H: That sounds like too good of an equipment for something used for an unreleased game.
S: The circuit board is similar to the one used in Aurail, but I didn't think it would have made much sense if we didn't improve the drivers, so that's why I made such elaborations.
Speaking of which, the CPU can sometimes make really good sounds when you overclock it. I remember trying to get such results by experimenting with sounds by overclocking the data (laughs) and I got lots of sounds that wouldn't had been possible this way.
I did it often during development. I do create a lot of sound drivers though, in case I make a mistake in the data sequencing. If a mistake is called by an affected address, then a terrible obnoxious noise is caused. I really don't know why I do such things (laughs), when I want to reproduce and analyze such sounds, I emitted them through all sound channels, and in the end it becomes impossible to use them... Such things happens like that.
As for the tone, during the final days in which I used FM sound module, I approached it for their voice synthesis function, but then I stopped since it didn't sound very well. I experimented with the voice coder a lot, but it gave out nothing but bugs. (laughs)
It was around that time I've started being involved in console games. I began with Monster World III. It was a very new to me at the time. I connected the MIDI terminal from a PC to a Mega Drive and then composed music firsthand with a "Recomposer".
H: That's such a terrible story. There are people who want to do such things, but they don't turn out so well. Going back to Aquario, the master tape suddenly begins from the Round 5 BGM. Why...?
S: Unlike when I worked on Aurail, Aquario was mostly made before I worked on the music. The music was not added until the last moment. I think that tune was the first one I've composed for the game. I felt it was easier to make a music for the final stage (Note that the track title is "Clockwork Aquario", the English translation of the game's title).
The Groove of Aquario
H: Finally, which track would you say is your most favorite?
S:My most favorite is definitely "Cooney Droop (Round 2 BGM)". I definitely think of myself when I listen to it. The first half is made so that the euphoria does not occur as much as possible all the way through until reaching the high point of the tune.
I pointed this out to Namiki today, but I often change the arrangement by the first chorus and the second chorus. I've wrote down all the details just in the case for the production of the CD, so that the person recording it wouldn't leave anything out (laughs). Yes, that's how I felt it.
In the old days I would copy and paste a lot, ending up with two identical choruses, so I would think about adding a few twists as well.
My next favorite would be "The Land of Pureness (ending)". Maybe I was influenced by Toshinobu Kubota (Japanese singer/songwriter). By this point, I began understand what a groove was for the first time. Even though I devoted myself to it like any other tune, it somehow felt different as well. After many trials and errors, I finally understood what it was. Although modern sequencers usually have a quantization feature that lets you know how much groove it's giving out.
Aquario was the first soundtrack I made which featured some groove. A sixteenth note for example, usually becomes the same length like all other when processed by a sequencer. However, the groove is delayed when the beginning is a bit too long. I didn't know what I was doing back then, but now it feels natural.
H: The sequencers sold back then in Japan weren't good for determining the groove.
S: That's right. It eats lots of memory as well. Although the data can be easily optimized only if the sixteenth note continues for a long time.
H: I learned about such things from Sega's Fantasy Zone and it managed to stay with me since.
S: Fantasy Zone was good. That was System 16, which was close in terms of structure to the System 18 hardware used for Aquario. There's another tune I want to comment on... "Frisky Brisky (Round 1 BGM)". This brought out the Julianna (a Japanese discothèque) in me. Because of the circumstances of PCM, it wasn't possible to employ an orchestra hit, even though I've never went to Julianna's (laughs). At any rate, it seems as if two or more rhythms can be heard at the same time while the tune is played, the reality is that PCM only has one channel. Therefore, the sound of a cowbell and the sound of a snare for instance, are not only separately recorded, they're recorded together as well, giving the impression of two sound channels playing when it's really just one.
H: The PCM chip must have a bad tone quality then.
S: Yes, the sampling rate is too low, so the high-hat system was not good. I had no other choice but FM. I already did PCM rhythm with Aurail, but that could only be used for voices, but I had to use it by force.
H:I think it's possible to improve the sounds by just taking advantage of the bass like PCM does. It seems Aquario focuses a bit on bass.
S: Yes it does. It's a problem of balance. It was necessary to reduce the volume of the other parts in order to make the bass stand out. When it was put on a video arcade, people thought the sounds were too low and tried to increase the volume of the board. I've assumed increase the bass would've solve such problems. I remember making the same mistake while working on Senjyo during my days in Tehkan (laughs).
H: I see, so it was revenge after ten years. (laughs)