What were some of the most important factors in writing music for 8-bit games?
HI: For the Famicom, there was a limit on how many sounds you could use simultaneously, so if you wrote the music without taking into account the limited number of sounds, the song would turn out too simple. It was really important to start off with a catchy melody, something that you would have no trouble humming. Being easy to remember was an important quality of Famicom music. Another challenge was taking into consideration the memory capacity. That was something you had to keep in mind from the outset. The problem was, if all you worried about was the data size, the music would come out too simple. There were various ways to go about working around the problem. One of them was to use delays to create an echo effect. That required programming the system to automatically insert notes to fill in the gaps in the original data. I used this technique more frequently in the latter part of work in Famicom games. It was a strategy for writing interesting music that fit the constraints of th
