Koichi Sugiyama

Life

Koichi Sugiyama was born in Tokyo on April 11, 1931. He began writing small pieces of music in high school, graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1956, and went into broadcasting, first with Nippon Cultural Broadcasting and, from 1958, as a director at Fuji Television. He left Fuji TV in 1965 to freelance and by 1968 had turned entirely to composition and orchestration. Over the next fifteen years he wrote for musicals, commercials, pop singers, animated films and television, including Science Ninja Team Gatchaman: The Movie and Cyborg 009, assisted Riichiro Manabe on Godzilla vs. Hedorah, and wrote the 1976 hit "Heart Dorobō" for the pop trio Candies, as some sources credit. Outside music he was honorary chairman of the Japanese Backgammon Society.

Work

His path into games began as a player. In the early 1980s he filled in a feedback questionnaire for one of Enix's PC shogi games, and Enix producer Yukinobu Chida, seeing the name, contacted him to confirm that this was the Sugiyama from television. Enix asked him to compose, and after the 1986 game Wingman 2 he took on his first major project: Dragon Quest (1986), designed by Yuji Horii with art by Akira Toriyama.

The Famicom offered only a few simple sound channels, but Sugiyama wrote for it as if for an orchestra. He said the opening theme, the march now known as the "Overture," took him five minutes, and that his experience with television commercials, where a composer has three to five seconds to catch an audience, helped him write the short jingles for inns, level-ups and fanfares. His eight-part score of Opening, Castle, Town, Field, Dungeon, Battle, Final Battle and Ending was considered revolutionary for console music and became a template for Japanese RPGs (JRPG) soundtracks. The same year Enix released Dragon Quest Suite, with his music played by the Tokyo Strings Ensemble, among the first game soundtracks recorded with live orchestra. On August 20, 1987, at Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the ensemble performed his Dragon Quest I and II symphonic suites at the first "Family Classic Concert," one of the earliest concerts of game music; he held these concerts annually until 2019.

He scored every main Dragon Quest released in his lifetime, reusing motifs and the familiar "Overture" to give the series continuity across decades; his style has been compared to late Baroque and early Classical music. By the end he had written more than 500 pieces for the franchise. From 1991 to 1996 he organized the Orchestral Game Concerts, which played music by more than eighteen game composers, including Nobuo Uematsu, Koji Kondo and Yoko Kanno. In 1995 he composed a Dragon Quest ballet that premiered in 1996 and entered the repertoire of the Star Dancers Ballet. His music was performed by the London Philharmonic and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony orchestras, and in 2005 it was played for the first time in a symphonic concert outside Japan, in Leipzig. He also composed for other Enix games and for Dragon Quest spin-offs, and served as sound producer on Master of Monsters (1991).

Legacy

Sugiyama is widely regarded as a founding figure of Japanese game music and an inspiration for the composers who followed him. His belief that games deserved serious orchestral writing, and his concerts that proved audiences would come to hear it, prepared the ground for the global game-concert circuit of later decades. Japan's government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun in 2018 and named him a Person of Cultural Merit in 2020.

His public life also included politics that many found offensive, and a complete account must record them. He was a board member of the nationalist Japan Institute for National Fundamentals. He engaged in denial of the Nanjing Massacre, and in 2007 he was among the signatories of "The Facts," a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post disputing the historical record on the "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. In a 2015 television appearance he agreed with a politician who argued that there was no need for LGBT education in schools, though he later said that LGBT couples had always existed and that governments could sometimes support them.

Sugiyama died of septic shock in Tokyo on September 30, 2021, at the age of 90. A Nippon TV drama about his work on Dragon Quest aired in 2022.