I want you to close your eyes for a second. Well,
not if you're driving, obviously. Right. Keep
your eyes on the road. Yeah, please. But if you
can, just imagine the sound of your childhood.
And I don't mean like the voices of your parents
or the sound of the school bus. I mean the electronic
pulse of the 1980s and 90s. Oh, absolutely. The
classics. Exactly. The frantic, accelerating
tempo of Tetris when the blocks start stacking
up way too high. Or the eerie alien silence of
landing on planet Zeebies in Metroid. Or even
just the weirdly tropical bouncy vibe of Super
Mario Land. It really is the soundtrack of a
whole generation. But it's also something much
more specific than that. It is the sound of a
very specific type of hardware pushing against
its own limits. Right. Because we tend to think
of these as just, you know, Nintendo songs. Like
they just appeared out of the ether. They were
all cranked out by one giant corporate music
department. Which couldn't be further from the
truth. Exactly. Looking at the research you've
pulled together for us today, it turns out the
sonic fingerprint of the Game Boy, the NES, the
Famicom... It isn't just a corporate style at
all. It traces back largely to one single human
brain. It does. Today, we're doing a deep dive
into the life and the mind of Hirokazu Tanaka,
or, as he was known then, Hip Tanaka. And as
the cool kids know him now, Chip Tanaka. Chip
Tanaka, yeah. And the biggest misconception we
really need to clear up right away is the idea
that he was just a composer. Okay, let's unpack
this. Because usually in game development, especially
back in the early days, you had the hardware
guys soldering the boards in one room and the
creative guys writing the tunes in another room
entirely. The distinct lanes. They really didn't
cross over. Right, but Tanaka didn't have a lane.
He basically built the road. I mean, he was an
electronic engineer who literally designed the
audio hardware for the Famicom and the Game Boy.
Wow. And then, after building the chips, he sat
down and wrote the music that played on them.
See, that is the hook for me. It's like finding
out the guy who painted the Mona Lisa also, I
don't know, invented the canvas and mixed the
chemicals for the paint himself. That's a great
way to put it. So we have this figure, Tanaka.
He's responsible for the music in Metroid, Kid
Icarus, Earthbound, Tetris, basically the Mount
Rushmore of 8 -bit audio. But his background
isn't classical music, is it? Far from it. And
this is where the story gets really, really interesting.
If you want to understand the Nintendo sound,
you don't actually look at Japanese folk music
or classical orchestration. You have to look
at Jamaican reggae. Which is, I mean, that is
the very last thing I expected to find in the
biography of a Japanese engineer in 1980. I know
it's wild, but it's the key to everything he
did. But before we get to the reggae, we have
to place him in Kyoto. 1980, Tanaka just graduated
from university with a degree in electronic engineering
and he applies to Nintendo. But his motivation
is, well, it's kind of hilarious in hindsight.
He wanted an easy life, didn't he? I read that
he thought making toys would be relatively stress
-free. Exactly. He thought, he's a toy company.
How hard can it possibly be? Right. He basically
wanted a job where he could coast a little bit
and just relax. And instead he walked right into
a meat grinder. An absolute grinder. Remember,
this was the absolute dawn of the video game
industry. We're talking about shifts that started
at 9 in the morning and didn't end until 2 or
3 in the morning the next day. Good grief. And
the environment wasn't what we picture today
at all. There were no sleek dual monitor setups,
no visual development interfaces, none of that.
They were working on TTY devices. Yeah, I've
seen that term in the source notes, TTY. For
listeners who haven't really dug into computing
history, can you explain what that actually looked
like in the room? Sure. TTY stands for Teletypewriter.
So imagine an actual physical typewriter connected
to a mainframe computer. There is no screen.
Wait, no screen at all? No screen. You type your
code, your assembly language, or your hex values,
and you get a physical printout on paper. You
are essentially coding blind. So if you're writing
music, you're doing it by typing numbers onto
paper. You can't just hit a playback button and
see a waveform on a monitor. Exactly. You type
the code, you compile it, burn it to a ROM, physically
plug it into the hardware, and then just listen.
Tanaka actually said that the history of games
and the history of computers totally overlapped
for them. They were literally inventing the development
tools at the exact same time they were trying
to make the games. That is insane. If they needed
a tool to visualize a sound wave, They had to
pause and code the tool first. Everything was
handmade in the most literal, technical sense
of the word. That puts a whole new spin on the
8 -bit aesthetic. It wasn't an aesthetic choice
at all. It was a survival mechanism. Precisely.
But let's circle back to the music itself. You
mentioned reggae. How does a stressed -out, overworked
engineer in Kyoto become obsessed with the Jamaican
dub music? It started with a very specific moment
in the 70s. Tanaka's mother had actually made
him take piano lessons as a kid, but he rebelled
against that. Fast forward, he's a young guy
eating pasta at a restaurant in Kyoto that had
live music or a DJ playing, and suddenly he hears
this track called Negreya Love Dub by Lin -Val
Thompson. And the story goes that he literally
stopped eating. He completely froze. He was so
confused by what he was hearing. Because in dub
music, the engineer at the mixing board is basically
the lead artist. They take a traditional reggae
track and they strip it way down. They drop out
the vocals. They drop out the guitar, leaving
just the heavy drums and the bass. Right. And
then they use these heavy exaggerated tape delays
and echoes. So he's sitting there hearing these
massive gaps in the sound. Right. He kept stopping
his fork because he genuinely thought the restaurant's
audio equipment was He's thinking, why is the
sound cutting out? Is the tape snapping? But
then it clicked for him. He realized the silence
was intentional. The gap itself was the instrument.
He later said that deep bass sound, that heavy
vibration, and the strategic use of silence,
it just hooked him completely. And he didn't
just fanboy over it from a distance, right? He
actually started a band. He did. He started a
band called The Shampoos. Which is just an S
-tier band name, by the way. It really is. And
they were legitimate, too. They weren't just
some garage cover band. They actually opened
for reggae legends Sly and Robbie at the Reggae
Sunsplash Festival in Osaka. That is serious
street cred for a Nintendo engineer. No kidding.
So connect the dots for us here. How does playing
Jamaican dub in a club in Osaka translate to
composing the music for Wrecking Crew on the
NES? This is really the core genius of Tanaka's
entire career. Yeah. The NES hardware, the Famicom,
was incredibly limited. You had a very specific,
tiny number of sound channels, two pulse wave
channels for melody, one triangle wave for bass,
and a noise channel for percussion. And that
is it. And usually in those old games, if you
play a sound effect, like a character jumping
or a bomb exploding, it has to basically steal
one of those audio channels, right? So the music
just cuts out for a second. Exactly. And most
composers absolutely hated that. They tried to
write these dense continuous melodies and just
sort of hoped the sound effects wouldn't ruin
the song too badly. But Tanaka went the complete
opposite direction. He applied his dub philosophy.
Ah, I see where this is going. He realized that
if he voluntarily cut holes in his own melody,
if he deliberately left silence in the track,
it accomplished two massive things. First, it
left room for the sound effects to act as part
of the rhythm section. So the sound of Mario
jumping or a block breaking essentially becomes
the snare drum for the track. Precisely. And
second, he used the listener's own brain to fill
in the gaps. He called it his dub bass structure.
By creating a really heavy bass line on the triangle
channel and then topping up the melody, he made
the music feel much bigger than the tiny little
chip could actually support. He was using the
hardware limitation as a texture, exactly like
a dub mixer uses silence. He was basically hacking
our psychoacoustics because he physically couldn't
hack the chip any further. Exactly. He realized
early on that on an 8 -bit chip, you simply can't
simulate a grand orchestra. Just sounds like
garbage. But you can simulate a raw, gritty,
bass -heavy dub track. It fits the digital medium
perfectly. Speaking of hacking the chip, we really
need to talk about his work on Donkey Kong. This
is 1981. He's doing the sound effects. And I
read this anecdote in the sources about the footsteps,
which I think perfectly captures exactly who
this guy is. Oh, the footsteps story is a perfect
example of his absolute obsession with detail.
So in 1981, memory on a game cartridge was incredibly
expensive. Every byte mattered. If you had a
sound for Mario walking, standard practice was
to just play that exact same tiny file over and
over. Doot, doot, doot. Right, just a loop. But
Tanaka hated that. He thought it sounded rigid
and robotic. So what did he do? Did he just make
more sounds? He couldn't. There wasn't enough
memory. So he programmed a subtle algorithm that
slightly altered the pitch and the decay of that
single -footstep sound every single time it triggered.
That is wild. It's almost imperceptible to the
conscious mind, but your brain registers it as
organic. It sounds like physical shoes hitting
different parts of a metal girder. rather than
a computer beeping. He's barely sleeping, he's
working on a typewriter with no screen, and he's
spending his time hand -coding microscopic pitch
variations for virtual shoes. That was his level
of commitment. But not every experiment of his
worked out, right? There was the whole help me
incident. The help me incident, yes. This is
a classic failure story from his early days.
So in Donkey Kong, Pauline, the lady that Mario
is trying to save from the giant ape, she is
supposed to scream for help. Tanaka wanted to
use actual voice... for this. Which in 1981 was,
I mean, ambitious is probably an understatement.
Ambitious is definitely polite. The technology
was totally primitive. But he synthesized a voice
saying, help me, trying his hardest to make it
sound human. But before he could go in the game,
he had to present it to the ultimate test audience.
And it wasn't a focus group. It was the daughter
of the company president, Hiroshi Yomochi. And
Yomochi was famously a terrifying figure in Nintendo
history, very strict. Absolutely terrifying.
So Tanaka brings in this tape. He plays this
synthesized robot scream for Yamaki's daughter.
She listens to it, looks at him, and just says,
that doesn't sound like, help me. Ouch. And that
was it. Feature cut. Back to the drawing board.
Brutal. But that failure really seems to be an
outlier in his career. He talks a lot in the
sources about how he learned a kind of perfectionism
from another Nintendo legend, Shigeru Miyamoto.
Miyamoto's influence on him was huge. Tanaka
saw how Miyamoto would obsess over the physical
feel of a jump or the exact acceleration speed
of a character on screen. Tanaka took that and
applied the exact same rigor to the audio. He
realized sound wasn't just background noise.
It was crucial player feedback. That philosophy
really peaks with Metroid in 1986. And looking
at the notes, this seems to be the moment Tanaka
officially decided to stop trying to be catchy.
Metroid is absolutely the turning points. Up
until 1986, video game music was basically all
major key, high tempo, very upbeat. Think Super
Mario Bros. or Pac -Man. It was very gamey. Right.
Tanaka wanted to completely destroy that cliche.
He was inspired by a very specific film score
for a movie called Birdie. Wait, the Nicolas
Cage movie? That's the one. He loved that the
music in Birdie was dark, atmospheric, and really
uncomfortable. It actively withheld giving the
audience what they wanted until the very end
of the film. And that's exactly what Metroid
is. You land on Zeebies and it's definitely not
a bop. It's this bubbling, ominous, almost dissonant
sound. It feels like you are actually trapped
in a hostile alien cave. It creates an intense
sense of isolation. And internally at Nintendo,
people hated it. Oh really? They pushed back?
Oh yeah, the development team was super confused.
They kept coming to him and asking, where is
the melody? This is a video game. It's supposed
to be fun. This music is just depressing. So
how on earth did he get away with it? Why didn't
upper management just make him change it to a
happy 8 -bit samba? This is the fascinating contradiction
of Nintendo in the 1980s. Today we think of them
as this very tightly controlled corporate entity.
But back then, the sound team had zero quotas,
no sales targets, no marketing team analyzing
the retention rates of the background music.
Tanaka basically had absolute creative autonomy.
That is unimaginable today. You'd have a committee
of 12 different executives analyzing the churn
risk of scary music in level one. Exactly. But
because he had that freedom, he could execute
this brilliant psychological trick on the player.
He withheld the reward of a catchy melody for
the entire game. The music just builds and builds
tension for hours. So when you finally beat Mother
Brain and the credits roll the ending theme,
which is this triumphant, highly melodic track,
it hits you like a truck. It feels like a massive
release of endorphins. He literally engineered
the emotional payoff. He did. And speaking of
engineering, we really have to underscore the
hardware aspect again. Because while he is fighting
for this dark artistic vision in Metroid, he
is simultaneously working on the hardware design
team for the Game Boy. This is the part I still
struggle to wrap my head around. The Game Boy
wasn't just a product he made music for. He was
on the core team that invented it. He was one
of only five or six people. He personally researched
and designed the audio hardware. So when you
boot up a Game Boy and you hear that iconic bing
on startup or you hear the classic sounds of
Tetris, you are hearing a physical chip that
Tanaka helped build playing digital instructions
that Tanaka wrote. Talk about full stack development.
That's doing everything. And he didn't stop at
audio either. He actually co -designed and directed
the Game Boy camera and the Game Boy printer.
I had one of those. It was incredibly grainy,
grayscale, and just completely magical at the
time. It really was ahead of its time. Yeah.
Tanaka was inspired by the view cam camcorders
that were popular back then. He became totally
obsessed with the idea of getting visual input
onto a handheld game device. He was even running
wild experiments trying to get live TV signals
to display on the Game Boy screen in the early
90s. Watching live TV on a Game Boy, that is
some serious cyberpunk ambition for 1992. It
connects back to the bigger picture of his worldview.
Tanaka really didn't distinguish between engineering
a circuit board and composing a song. To him,
both of those things were acts of creation. Whether
he was soldering a connection or placing a quarter
note on a staff, he was building an experience.
It's all just signals and waves at the end of
the day. So we move into the 90s. The Game Boy
is a massive, world -changing hit. Metroid is
a cult classic. But then comes Pokemon, and this
shifts his trajectory entirely. It does. Tanaka
had a colleague named Sunakazu Ishihara, who
was the producer of EarthBound. Ishihara basically
told Tanaka he should come work for the new venture
he was starting, which eventually became Creatures
Inc. And Creatures is one of the three companies
that manage the entire Pokemon brand, right?
Exactly. But Tanaka was still fully employed
at Nintendo at this point. Yes, he was. So he
started Moonlighting. He wrote the opening and
ending themes for the Pokemon anime in Japan.
Wait, like the Japanese equivalent of the I want
to be the very best song? Yes. The main track
was called Maisier Pokemon Master. And these
songs didn't just do okay, they became absolute
monsters. Best sellers, topping the national
music charts. So you have a Nintendo hardware
engineer who accidentally becomes a chart -topping
pop songwriter on the side. Which naturally created
a massive corporate conflict. Nintendo had a
very strict policy. Employees could not work
for other companies, even friendly partner companies
like Creatures. They basically called him in
and told him, you have to stop writing these
anime songs. You're an engineer here, not a pop
star. So he had a choice to make. the stable,
prestigious gig at the biggest game company in
the world, or the creative freedom to write bangers
for Pikachu. He chose freedom. He officially
resigned from Nintendo in 1999 and joined Creatures
Inc. full -time. And typical Tanaka, he didn't
just join as a staff composer, he climbed the
corporate ladder. He eventually became the president
of the entire company. The guy who stopped eating
pasta because he was so mesmerized by dub gaps
became the president of the company managing
Pokemon from 2001 all the way to 2023. He succeeded
his old friend Ishihara. That is just a staggering
career arc. But did he stop making music when
he put on the executive suit? Never. In fact,
he's had a huge resurgence recently. He started
performing live at dance clubs under the stage
name Chip Tanaka. Chip, as in chiptune, I assume.
Yes, but there's a funny layer to that name change.
His old nickname at Nintendo was Hip Tanaka.
Hip? Where did Hip come from? Well, a friend
of his pointed out that Hip was way too tied
to his Nintendo past. Tanaka originally chose
the name Hip because he absolutely loved hip
-hop music, specifically the group A Tribe Called
Quest. I'm sorry, A Tribe Called Quest. Yes.
Reggae, dub, and A Tribe Called Quest. His musical
taste was impeccable, so he changed Hip to Chip.
to embrace the modern chiptune scene. So now
you have this high level executive, a president
of a major company, standing in a DJ booth, blasting
heavy 8 -bit beats for a massive crowd of 20
-somethings who probably have absolutely no idea
that he personally built the hardware that defined
the genre they're dancing to. That is the literal
definition of legend behavior. It really is.
And despite the heavy techno beats and the executive
title, he never lost that deep emotional core
in his music. When Satoru Iwata, the very beloved
CEO of Nintendo, passed away in 2015, Tanaka
released a tribute track called Dedicated to
Satoru Iwata. I've actually heard that track.
It's not just a catchy loop. It is genuinely
heartbreaking. It's a beautiful piece of music.
It shows his incredible range from the scary
alien silence of Metroid to the goofy bouncy
fun of Dr. Mario, which, by the way, he says
was the very first time he truly felt like his
own personality came through in a game, all the
way to these deep emotional tributes. And all
of it coming from a guy who just wanted a stress
-free job making toys. It really highlights how
incredibly unique that early Nintendo environment
was. It was this wild frontier where a reggae
-loving engineer could accidentally define the
sound of a generation just by trying to work
around arbitrary memory limits. And I think that
brings us to the real lesson here. Why does Tanaka's
story matter beyond just retro nostalgia? I think
it's really about the fundamental relationship
between constraints and creativity. We hear that
phrase a lot, right? Constraints breed creativity.
But Tanaka is the empirical, undeniable proof
of it. Exactly. We live in an era of infinite
tracks now. You use a digital audio workstation
today. You have unlimited cloud storage, infinite
processing power. If you want a full 80 -piece
orchestra, you just click a button. If you want
a gospel choir, you click another button. And
you can fix absolutely anything in post. You
don't need to use the silence to save memory
anymore. But Sinaka had to. He had three simple
tones and a noise channel. He had a few tiny
kilobytes of memory. He couldn't add more sounds.
He had to subtract them. And by using that Jamaican
dub technique of actively cutting holes in the
music, he created a sound that was infinitely
punchier and more memorable than a full symphony
would have been on that hardware. So the Nintendo
sound wasn't a stylistic choice at all. It was
a brilliant solution to an engineering problem.
It was a perfect fusion of electronic engineering
necessity and Jamaican dub sensibilities. He
proved once and for all that strict limitations
aren't the enemies of art. They are the exact
fuel for it. That is such a powerful takeaway
for anyone doing any kind of creative work today.
We're all kind of drowning in options and tools.
Maybe the secret is to actively, artificially
limit ourselves. Um, pluck the second monitor.
Yeah. Limit yourself to four tracks. See what
happens. You might just invent a whole new genre.
Or at least write a really catchy tune while
eating some pasta. Ideally both. Before we wrap
up this deep dive, I want to leave you, the listener,
with a thought to really chew on. We spent so
much of our time trying to upgrade our tools,
getting the faster computer, the better camera,
the more expensive software subscription, but
Tanaka's best, most enduring work came from the
struggle of fitting a symphony into a tiny microchip.
In your own life or your own work, where are
you fighting against a limitation right now?
And instead of fighting it, what if you treated
it like a dub mixer? What if the gap in your
resources is actually the most interesting part
of the song? That is the big question. Thanks
for diving deep with us today. Go listen to some
reggae, play a little Metroid, and appreciate
the silence between the beeps. We'll see you
on the next one. Take care.