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21 - Female Credit: Excavating Recognition for the Capcom Sound Team

from Part V - Game Music, Contexts and Identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2021

Melanie Fritsch
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Tim Summers
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
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Summary

This chapter focuses on the Japanese game development company Capcom (CAPsule COMputers), arguably ‘a well-established developer and publisher’,1 known for some of the most popular action arcade games of the 1980s and early 1990s, including Ghosts ’n Goblins (1985), Commando (1985), Bionic Commando (1987), Final Fight (1989), Ghouls ’n Ghosts (1988) and Street Fighter II (1991), developed with male players in mind. The music for these action games was provided by the mostly female Capcom Sound Team. Ayako Mori and Tamayo Kawamoto joined Capcom in 1984, and other core members of the team included Junko Tamiya, Manami Matsumae, Harumi Fujita, Yoko Shimomura and Tamayo Kawamoto, most of whom left the company in 1990 shortly after their seminal soundtrack work as a team on the arcade game Final Fight had been completed. Yoko Shimomura, who composed the memorable themes for Street Fighter II, left Capcom for the game developer Square in 1993 to pursue her dream of scoring orchestral music for role-playing game (RPG) titles, bringing to an end the domination of Capcom’s female Sound Team. This collective of female composers went on to influence a host of game composers through their pioneering work on early arcade hardware. Yet in versions of games ported from the arcade to home consoles and computers, their work was left uncredited. Popular recognition for their work has been relatively slow, due to a number of factors that include the use of pseudonyms and the company’s crediting policy, as well as the routine exscription of women in a male-dominated game industry.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Cook, Karen M.Beyond (the) Halo: Plainchant in Video Games’, in Studies in Medievalism XXVII: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music, ed. Fugelso, Karl. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2018, 183200.Google Scholar
Gibbons, William. Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Ivănescu, Andra. ‘Beneath a Steel Sky: A Musical Characterisation of Class Structure.The Computer Games Journal 7 (2018): 231–42.Google Scholar
Miller, Kiri. ‘Jacking the Dial: Radio, Race, and Place in “Grand Theft Auto.”Ethnomusicology 51, no. 3 (2007): 402–38.Google Scholar
Plank, Dana. ‘Bodies in Play: Representations of Disability in 8- and 16-bit Video Game Soundscapes’. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018.Google Scholar

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