Konami
| Konami | |
 |
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| Founded | March 21, 1969 |
| Headquarters | Tokyo Midtown, Minato, Tokyo, Japan |
| Website | www.konami.com |
| Other Names | Ultra Games |
Konami (コナミ) is a Japanese game developer and publisher and has been one of the leading game companies to this day. Konami has been known for their classics such as the Castlevania and Contra series. They are also known for the famous Konami code which appears in many of their games (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A).
During the NES era, third-party developers were only limited to publishing five games a year. In order to produce more games a year, Konami created Ultra Games.
Games
Music Development
Genesis
Konami had three different sound drivers; the Vampire Killer variant, Hyperstone Heist variant, and Lethal Enforcers variant. Based on the various credits found in these games, the drivers were programmed by Atsushi Fujio and Osamu Kasai. Akira Soji and Hideto Inoue may have also worked on the variants based on various game credits.
NES
The music was written in assembly. It is unknown who first created the sound engine, but the version used in most of their NES games was designed by Hidenori Maezawa, and many composers such as Jun Funahashi, Atsushi Fujio, and Kouji Murata either tweaked Hidenori's code as needed, or designed their own drivers from scratch. Sometimes the composer would be directly responsible for the in-game arrangements; otherwise, they would just write the music out in sheet form and have a programmer arrange it in-game.
Some Chinese and Taiwanese developers would later use Konami's sound engine (mainly Super Contra, Tiny Toon Adventures and TwinBee 3) such as Ren Yongming from Waixing or Han Ming Liao from Gamtec.
SNES
Their earliest SNES titles used a largely unaltered version of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun sound driver. Atsushi Fujio later made some tweaks to this driver to create the version that was used for most of their subsequent SNES titles.
Audio Personnel
These composers/sound designers worked at Konami:
- Aki Hata
- Akira Souji
- Akira Yamaoka
- Atsushi Fujio
- Ayako Nishigaki
- Harumi Ueko
- Hidehiro Funauchi
- Hidenori Maezawa
- Hideto Inoue
- Hideyuki Eto
- Hirofumi Taniguchi
- Hiroshi Takeyasu
- Iku Mizutani
- Jun Chuma
- Jun Funahashi
- Junichiro Kaneda
- Katsuhiko Suzuki
- Kazuki Muraoka
- Katsuhiko Suzuki
- Kazuhiko Uehara
- Kazuo Hanzawa
- Keizo Nakamura
- Kenichi Matsubara
- Kinuyo Yamashita
- Kouji Murata
- Kozo Nakamura
- Kyouhei Sada
- Masae Nakashima
- Masanori Adachi
- Masahiro Ikariko
- Masanori Oouchi
- Michiru Yamane
- Motoaki Furukawa
- Miki Higashino
- Minako Matsuhira
- Mutsuhiko Izumi
- Sachiko Yataka
- Satoe Terashima
- Satoko Minami
- Satoshi Murata
- Seiya Murai
- Shigemasa Matsuo
- Shigeru Fukutake
- Shinji Tasaka
- Shinya Sakamoto
- Shokichi Ishihara
- Suzuki Kyouta
- Takashi Tateishi
- Takayuki Fujii
- Takayuki Ogura
- Tappi Iwase
- Taro Kudo
- Thomas Lichtenstein
- Tomoko Sumiyama
- Tomoya Tomita
- Tsutomu Ogura
- Tsuyoshi Sekito
- Yasuhiko Manno
- Yatak
- Yoshiaki Hatano
- Yoshiyuki Hagiwara
- Yuichi Sakakura
- Yuji Takenouchi
Links
- mobygames.com/company/konami-corporation - MobyGames.
- vgmdb.net/artist/161 - VGMdb.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami - Wikipedia.
