The history of video game music is a fascinating topic – from overworked engineers struggling to squeeze the most out of their hardware to today’s orchestral arrangements, the medium has seen a ton of evolution in a half-century or so. There are a few names that have pushed the genre to new heights, and one of the best is making a return this week with the release of Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors. That group is ZUNTATA, the “house band” for legendary developers Taito, and we’re about to go on a journey through their greatest hits.
Founder Hisayoshi Ogura was working as a part-time piano teacher when he saw a Help Wanted ad that Taito had placed for salespeople. During his interview, he mentioned that he was a music school graduate, and a few days later he was asked to come by the company’s R&D wing because they had just opened a dedicated sound department. He would soon abandon sales to become a full-time composer for the company, relentlessly producing game music for games starting with 1985’s Legend of Kage.
It wasn’t until two years in that he found the project that would awaken his inner fire. Darius was a side-scrolling shooter that pit the player against massive cyborg fish and other foes. The game pushed the technological envelope in multiple ways, most noticeably by using three monitors to create a massive widescreen display that gave players a huge playing field to maneuver on. The audio also saw a major performance boost, and in recognition of Ogura’s work on the title it was the first arcade cabinet to ship with built-in headphone jacks, so gamers could plug their Walkman earpieces in and jam along with his melodic, intense tracks. In addition, the benches bolted to the machines contained subwoofers that would blast low-frequency tones along with the on-screen action.
The first piece of music Ogura composed for the game, the bouncy “Captain NEO,” was written just three months after he started at the company. When Taito put the song over a trade show demo of Darius, Ogura petitioned to be allowed to really pull out the stops on the game. He created the unique sounds through a combination of FM synthesis and sampling, building tracks in his head with the driving bass and complex melodies that would become a trademark.
That same year, Ogura would recruit a number of other musicians to translate his Taito soundtracks to live performance under the name ZUNTATA. The band included sound designer Masahiko Takaki and keyboard player Kazuko Umino, among a host of others. This was way before events like Video Games Live helped make VGM concerts a thing, but ZUNTATA found solid success in Japan. Their live shows were high-energy affairs with incredible technical skill on display – these songs were intended to be “played” by computers, capable of slamming out precisely timed arpeggios with digital ease. Transferring them to human hands was wildly difficult, but the group tackled the challenge head-on. Watching them slam through tracks live using a blend of synths and traditional instruments is awe-inspiring – check this video.
As Taito grew, other team members started to take up the compositional duties for games as well as playing live with ZUNTATA. The company began to get a reputation for high-quality music, and internally engineers would consult with them when determining the chipset for future machines. Sound technology at this time was limited to a set number of audio “channels,” with limited variability. The original Nintendo Entertainment System boasted five in total, while the Super Nintendo raised that to eight. Each game the team worked on had different compositional requirements to fit all of their music into these limited channels.
Taito’s next three-screen game would mark one of ZUNTATA’s high points. The Ninja Warriors is a bloody brawler in the Double Dragon mode, but the arcade hardware’s use of the YM2610 sound chip let Ogura and his crew create sounds that gamers had never heard before. It allowed composers to shift pitches on sampled instruments, and Ogura exploited it to the fullest, using the traditional Japanese shamisen alongside high-tech sounds and vocoder-filtered singing. That game’s standout song, “Daddy Mulk,” is one of ZUNTATA’s most legendary jams, a throbbing prog rocker with squealing synth leads.
The success of ZUNTATA would inspire other Japanese companies to put together “house bands” of their own. Capcom’s Alph Lyla, Data East’s Gamedelic, and Sega’s S.S.T. Band would all tour around live arrangements of tracks from the studio’s games. Few of those bands have enjoyed the longevity of Taito’s squad, unfortunately. ZUNTATA would stop playing live in the late 1990s as the arcade business collapsed and Taito released fewer games. The members would continue to provide soundtracks, as well as occasionally venturing outside of the company to provide music for stuff like a 2000s horror movie based on the work of manga author Junji Ito. The group returned in 2011 for a concert of Darius music and released a 25th anniversary greatest hits collection the next year.
Since then, they’ve taken up the mantle right where they left off, composing soundtracks for Taito’s ventures into mobile gaming like Arkanoid vs Space Invaders and music game Groove Coaster. Their open-ended, experimental approach and technical ferocity remains the same, despite the elimination of nearly every technical barrier that first shaped their music. Despite cycling through nearly all of the original members, they’re still playing live, most recently at this year’s Tokyo Game Show.
Their influence continues to spread. Synthesizer and software company KORG’s Gadget 2 app now includes “Ebina,” a FM synthesis module based on the chipset used by Taito for some of their legendary arcade games. The aggressive playing style pioneered by the band can also be heard in modern electronic artists like Anamanaguchi. By daring to push the envelope of what game music could do, Ogura and his squad made the entire industry take a quantum leap forward.
You can listen to almost all of ZUNTATA’s music on Spotify.
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