Did you know that the music for Castlevania (1986), Final Fight (1989), Mega Man (1987), Street Fighter II (1991), and other classic games produced by Capcom was composed by women? If not, there is a reason for this. There are numerous factors which contributed to the lack of visibility of these pioneering game composers for many years, and it is very difficult to go back and excavate information amidst the issues of crediting composers, as is outlined in Andrew Lemon and Hillegonda C. Rietveld’s chapter “Female Credit: Excavating Recognition for the Capcom Sound Team” in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music.1 Lemon and Rietveld describe how in addition to credit obfuscation via use of pseudonyms (discussed below), “memory storage limitations in early arcade games often resulted in an absence of a staff roll or a post-game credit sequence. In this context, it is a challenge for researchers (…) to seek out proper credit information for titles, with many relying on decoding high-score tables’ default values, and hidden data inside game code, as well as interview sources, to establish who contributed music to a game.”2

Members of the composing team known as “The Kunami Kokeiha Club” have included Ayako Mori (森 安也子), Tamayo Kawamoto (河本 圭代), Junko Tamiya (民谷淳子), Manami Matsumae (松前 真奈美), Harumi Fujita (藤田 晴美), Yoko Shimomura (下村 陽子) and others. Some of the barriers3 aside from technological limitations include the practice of crediting the “versioning work” when versions of music were made for different consoles, and the use of team-based composition as opposed to in the United States and United Kingdom where composers more often worked as individuals. The most signature issue when it comes to Capcom’s crediting however is their prevalent use of pseudonyms. These pseudonyms were often non-gender specific, adding to the fact that most Western audiences were already unable to recognize gender markers in Japanese names. A Capcom composer may be known under multiple pseudonyms, and the same pseudonym might be used by many different composers on the team at different points in time. These names also aren’t assigned one-to-one, as with the original Castlevania game, for which Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima composed the music together under one name: James Banana (a reference to James Bernard the composer for the 1958 Dracula film). 

Footnotes

  1. Andrew Lemon and Hillegonda C. Rietveld, “Female Credit: Excavating Recognition for the Capcom Sound Team” in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 376-88, doi:10.1017/9781108670289.023.
  2. Leom and Rietveld, p. 381.
  3. Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), doi:10.1017/9781108670289.