Like the entertainment medium of which it is a part, video-game music has traditionally occupied an odd space in the public psyche, at once regarded disdainfully as a lesser cousin of "real" art and cherished as a source of so many people's most powerful childhood memories.
With the children who grew up in the 8-bit golden age of 1980s gaming now in their 30s and 40s, it is perhaps inevitable that game music's legacy is gradually being reassessed and rehabilitated. And it is against that backdrop that Tokyo-based record label Brave Wave emerges, founded earlier this year by Kuwaiti video-game enthusiast Mohammed Taher, with a mission to bring the work of game composers out into the world.
Often when an art form is dismissed as somehow lesser, the real reason is that it is being judged by a set of critical standards designed for something else entirely, and which have no sensitivity to its unique properties, development process and environment. With that in mind, The Japan Times met up with game composers and Brave Wave labelmates Keiji Yamagishi (of "Ninja Gaiden" fame) and Saori Kobayashi (composer on "Panzer Dragoon Saga") to see if we could get to the bottom of what makes game music what it is.