Nobuo Uematsu is a Japanese composer and keyboardist best known for his contributions to the Final Fantasy video game series by Square Enix. A self-taught musician, he began playing the piano at the age of twelve, with English singer-songwriter Elton John as one of his biggest influences.
Chiptune, also called 8-bit music, is a style of electronic music made using the programmable sound generator (PSG) sound chips or synthesizers in vintage arcade machines, computers and video game consoles. The term is commonly used to refer to tracker format music using extremely basic and small samples that an old computer or console could produce, as well as music that combines PSG sounds with modern musical styles. It has been described as "an interpretation of many genres" since any existing song can be arranged in a chiptune style defined more by choice of instrument and timbre than specific style elements.
Timothy John Follin is an English video game music composer, cinematographer, visual effects artist and game developer, who has written tracks for a variety of titles and home gaming systems, including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, Nintendo Entertainment System, Mega Drive, Super NES, Game Boy, Dreamcast, and PlayStation.
Kenji Ito, also known by the nickname Itoken (イトケン), is a Japanese video game composer and musician. He is best known for his work on the Mana and SaGa series, though he has worked on over 30 video games throughout his career as well as composed or arranged music for over 15 other albums, concerts, and plays. He learned to play several instruments at a young age, and joined Square directly out of college as a composer in 1990 at the advice of a professor. He worked there for over a decade, composing many of his best-known scores. In 2001, he left Square to become a freelance composer, but has since continued to collaborate with the company.
Peter Nelson McConnell, also known as Peter Mc, is an American video game composer and musician. He is best known for his work at LucasArts and for composing the soundtracks for every Sly Cooper game since the second installment.
Bear McCreary is an American composer of film, television, and video game scores. His work includes the scores of the television series Battlestar Galactica (2004), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Black Sails, Outlander, The Walking Dead, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Serpent Queen, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Halo, the video games Call of Duty: Vanguard, God of War and God of War Ragnarök, and the film Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
Patrick Doyle is a Scottish composer and occasional actor best known for his film scores. During his 50-year career in film, television and theatre, he has composed the scores for over 60 feature films. A longtime collaborator of actor-director Kenneth Branagh, Doyle is known for his work on films such as Henry V, Sense and Sensibility, Hamlet, Carlito's Way, Quest for Camelot, and Gosford Park, as well as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Thor, Brave, Cinderella,Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
Fez is a 2012 indie puzzle-platform game developed by Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor. The player-character Gomez receives a fez that reveals his two-dimensional (2D) world to be one of four sides of a three-dimensional (3D) world. The player rotates between these four 2D views to realign platforms and solve puzzles. The objective is to collect cubes and cube fragments to restore order to the universe.
Anamanaguchi is an American chiptune-based pop and rock band from New York City. The band has four members: lead songwriters and guitarists Peter Berkman and Ary Warnaar, bassist James DeVito, and drummer Luke Silas.
The Prelude Op. 28, No. 4 by Frédéric Chopin is one of the 24 Chopin preludes. By Chopin's request, this piece was played at his own funeral, along with Mozart's Requiem.
Nier is an action role-playing video game developed by Cavia and published by Square Enix in 2010. The music of Nier was composed by Keiichi Okabe with members of his studio, Monaca, Kakeru Ishihama and Keigo Hoashi, and Takafumi Nishimura of Cavia. The soundtrack has inspired the release of four official albums by Square Enix—an official soundtrack album and three albums of arrangements—along with two mini-albums included as pre-order bonuses for the Japanese versions of the game and two licensed EPs of jazz arrangements.
John Paesano is an American composer working primarily in film, television, and video games. He is known for collaborating with director Wes Ball on the Maze Runner film trilogy and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, as well as composing for the Marvel Television series Daredevil and The Defenders. As a video game composer, he has contributed music to the acclaimed titles Detroit: Become Human and the three installments in the Marvel's Spider-Man series. Paesano won the BAFTA Games Award for Music, as well as the D.I.C.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition.
Hyper Light Drifter is an action role-playing game developed and published by Heart Machine. The Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X versions were released in March 2016, and the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions in July 2016. A Special Edition port of the game, featuring additional content, was released by Abylight Studios for the Nintendo Switch in September 2018, for iOS devices in July 2019 and for Android devices in June 2024.
Jimmy Hinson, also known as Big Giant Circles, is an American musician and composer in the video games industry. Originally adopting the name as a hobbyist submitting video game music remixes/rearrangements to OverClocked ReMix, Hinson now actively composes video game soundtracks. He has contributed to the soundtracks of Borderlands 2, Threes!, There Came an Echo, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix,Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Mass Effect 2. Hinson is credited with his work on several independent games including Pocket Mine and Extreme Roadtrip 2, and has contributed to OverClocked ReMix. His style has garnered him praise from Daniel Floyd of Extra Credits and Anthony and Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?, as well as positive press from Kotaku and GameTrailers.
The high-profile and protracted five-year development of the video game Fez led to its status as an "underdog darling of the indie game scene". The 2012 puzzle-platform game built around rotating between four 2D views of a 3D space was developed by indie developer Polytron Corporation and published by Polytron, Trapdoor, and Microsoft Studios. Over the course of the game's development, Fez designer and Polytron founder Phil Fish received celebrity status for his outspoken public persona and prominence in the 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie, which followed the game's final stages of development and Polytron's related legal issues. The game was released to critical acclaim as an Xbox Live Arcade timed exclusive, and was later ported to other platforms. It had sold one million copies by the end of 2013.
Heart Machine, Inc. is an American independent video game development studio founded by Alx Preston. The studio is best known for developing Hyper Light Drifter (2016) and Solar Ash (2021).
Keiji Yamagishi is a Japanese video game music composer. He is known for his work on Tecmo's late 1980s and early 1990s NES titles, such as Ninja Gaiden. Yamagishi has been considered a pioneer of chiptune music, producing the soundtracks of numerous titles in the 8 bit era.
Aivi & Surasshu are an electronic composer duo, composed of pianist Aivi Tran and electronic artist Steven "Surasshu" Velema. They are known for composing soundtracks, including that of Cartoon Network's animated series Steven Universe. The two married in 2015.
Dreampunk is a microgenre of electronic music characterized by its focus on cinematic ambience and field recordings, combined with various traits and techniques from electronic genres such as techno, jungle, electro, and dubstep.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the score album composed by Disasterpeace to the 2021 film of the same name. The album was released on June 24, 2022 in digital formats by Lakeshore Records. It features 20 tracks from the original score, which plays in the film alongside several compositions from Hiroshi Yoshimura.
