Talk:Kazuo Sawa
Contents
Son's Posts
Sawa's son has posted stories on X about the games his father worked on. I thought it would be a good idea to share them here, whilst linking the original posts in Japanese.
Monty no Dokidoki Daisousage (FDS)
Up until then, in his production setup, he hadn't done any work sounding out actual hardware at home, so the plain Famicom wasn't even hooked up to the TV, and I couldn't play it.
Let me sort this out a bit. Up to that point, Dad's workflow had been:
Composing on guitar or keys (JX-8P) → Punching it into the computer and making demo data with the MKS-7 → Saving that to a floppy → Taking it to the game company's dev room → And there, doing the Famicom arrangements and programming.
(I'm guessing they could convert MKS-7 data for Famicom in the dev room, but that's just speculation.)
So even though we had a Famicom at home, the most he'd use it for was messing around with sample disks he'd gotten or borrowing reference games to test out—nothing more.
Then, along comes the rewritable Disk System, turning our home Famicom into a "dev machine."
No wonder he told me to keep my hands off it.
Now, about transferring data from the PC to the Famicom... I still can't quite recall it even now...
But vaguely, I remember that the disk we inserted into the Disk System was a Quick Disk with that special ring snapped onto it, and it was white.
How would a little kid like me know about Quick Disks or those rings? Well, that's because Dad would buy the magazine "Hacker (Nihon Bungeisha)" and make me read it...
The dev disks came in shiny paper envelopes, and they were kept in a lockable floppy case along with the other 5-inch data disks.
Well, even at home, it made sense for Dad to lock them up with that level of caution—after all, I was a devoted Hacker reader back then, and I'd parse and tweak PC game data disks to mess around with them.
He must've been thinking, "I can't have my son pulling some shady cracking stunt and wrecking my work tools."
In exchange, I was free to play PC games, and after Burning Point, he handed down a PC-8801mkIIMR to me as a leftover, and I'd play on that thing till the wee hours of the night.
Getting back to it: Right around when the Disk System dev setup was coming together, a "10MB" SASI hard disk showed up at home. I think the brand was Carott.
When I asked Dad why there was a carrot logo on the hard disk, I remember him saying something silly like, "Put it next to an Apple computer, and you've got an 'apple' and a 'carrot,' which makes Vermont curry."
(Vermont curry's got apple and honey in it, just so we're clear.)
That said, the hard disk was hooked up not to an Apple, but to a PC-9801VX21.
(Dad didn't buy an Apple Mac until a few years later, around when I started high school, I think.)
Just being able to quickly handle the equivalent of about ten 2HD floppies' worth of space seemed like a total game-changer for Dad.
The tunes in Monty are fun ones, too—just like you'd expect from him.
The setup's pretty gritty: The protagonist, framed for a crime, tracks down the real culprit to clear his name. But I recall him saying something like, "What I love is the ending, where his sweetheart who's believed in his innocence all along is waiting for him, and they have a wedding."
I thought, that's so like my movie-buff Dad. Happy endings in old Showa-era foreign films were exactly like that...
Memo: Magic John was a collab with Tasaki-san, who co-wrote the Kunio-kun period drama.
Addition: From the information I just received, Monty’s original version is the C64 (Commodore) version, so this is an arrangement of that one… And since I didn’t have a Commodore at home, I was thinking I wouldn’t know, but then suddenly I remembered. There was one cassette tape. It’s probably a reference copy with the original track recorded on it, something I got from the development company for reference purposes.
My memory is visual, so when it comes back to me suddenly, there’s a decent amount of information… Probably a Maxell cassette in that deep gray color, with a horizontally elongated rectangular clear window…
--Doommaster1994 (talk) 06:54, 12 February 2026 (EST)
Hikaru GENJI: Roller Panic (FDS)
Here’s the continuation about game music,
This is a bit later than the Kunio-kun era, but the BGM for the game shown in this image, “光GENJI ローラーパニック (Hikari GENJI Roller Panic)”, was composed by my father.
Of course, the title screen theme song is “ガラスの十代 (Glass no Jidai)”, so in today’s terms, you could say this was a chiptune arrangement of it.
He also took on work from Pony Canyon, and this connection with Hikari GENJI later led to “Ultima: Quest of the Avatar” (the Famicom version of Ultima IV), parts of the domestic PC versions of the Ultima series, and even Populous (the Super Famicom version).
Sorry that the timeline is jumping back and forth a bit… My memories don’t come out in perfect order, so it’s hard to summarize them neatly…
Back then, when overseas PC games were released in Japan, it was common for BGM and sound effects to be added.
Many overseas titles didn’t have background music playing during gameplay, so when localizing them for the domestic market, in addition to translating the text into Japanese, there was also demand for adding new music.
I think my father’s craftsman-like personality matched that need perfectly.
While I still remember, let me note this down: for the PC-98 version of “Populous”, the main theme song itself already existed in the Amiga version, so I believe he just arranged it and created the music data for the PC-98.
However, he used a technique to make the PC speaker produce sampled sounds similar to ADPCM, and that was applied to sound effects like sword-clashing noises.
Those sounds were actually made by clanging a fork and knife together at home. I was forced to help with that…
I believe this same beep-sampling technique was probably also used in the PC version of SimCity. My father borrowed some software from somewhere (probably Pony Canyon or the company that was developing for them), had me play SimCity, and whenever an event occurred (I think it was things like storms or monsters appearing), he told me to call him over so he could hear what kind of sound was playing.
He was probably trying to confirm earlier examples of the technique.
Recording was done on the PC-98, which had very little memory and limited floppy disk capacity, so naturally the sampling time was very short—only a few seconds at most. I think each sound effect probably used up an entire 2D floppy disk (320KB).
Then he would spend even more time compressing that data further. I still remember, when I was still an elementary school kid and asked him what data compression was, he explained, “If you write ○○○○○○○○○○ it takes up a lot of space, right? But if you write ○×10 instead, it’s much shorter. That’s the kind of thing we do to save disk space.”
I think having experience with the PC-88SR game “Burning Point” (published by Enix), where he had to carefully squeeze sampled sounds while combining them with game music and effects on a memory-constrained machine, was also a big factor.
Sorry that this time I wrote things completely out of chronological order, but since I’ll forget if I don’t write them down while I still remember, please forgive me.
--Doommaster1994 (talk) 06:58, 12 February 2026 (EST)
The Battle of Olympus (NES)
Game Music and Dad's Stories: Today, It's "Olympus no Tatakai: Ai no Densetsu"
I was raised with the idea that you shouldn't air the family's dirty laundry, but over the past few days' posts, I've really felt how much people love my dad's (the late) compositions. Plus, the more I write, the more memories come flooding back, so I end up continuing before I forget. I plan to wrap it up once I get to the SNES era.
My dad's masterpieces are undoubtedly "Kunio-kun: Hot-blooded Hardcore" and the "Hot-blooded High School" series, but setting those aside as a league of their own, the grand masterpieces, in my opinion, are "Burning Point (PC-88SR)," which I mentioned before, and this "Battle of Olympus."
The Battle of Olympus is "D"-lightfully straightforward in basing itself on Greek mythology, weaving together all sorts of episodes and heroic tales—even ones anyone would recognize from constellation stories, even if they're not mythology buffs—into a single adventure story of Orpheus. This adaptation is ridiculously well done, and as I'll mention later, it had a huge influence on my own creative work.
The graphics are beautiful too, with gorgeous gradient and shading effects achieved through dot tiling. Personally, I think it's the pinnacle of Famicom graphics. That said, on the CRT TVs of the time, the cave entrances were a bit hard to spot, I guess.
It's often a hot topic on SNS that old games had their graphics designed with dot bleed in mind, so that goodness doesn't come through on modern LCD monitors, but with The Battle of Olympus, even when output to a pixel-perfect monitor via a recent HDMI-compatible Famicom clone, it looks stunningly clean.
The graphical beauty shows up in the UI decorations too—for instance, there's a laurel wreath tiara-like ornament above the LIFE meter at the top of the screen, and embroidered patterns along the boundary with the action screen. You could say these non-functional graphics really highlight the richness of the game.
The character graphics are approachable as well, nicely capturing the signature traits of the monsters from Greek mythology. The "Pygmies (spear-wielding little people)" that show up a bit after the game starts are so cute!
And as for the captive heroine, Helen, she's treated on another level altogether: there's a full-body illustration, drawn in a perfect brushstroke that's neither too anime-like nor too painterly, giving her a delicate, fragile beauty that any guy would want to rush in and save.
Now, let's talk about the music production.
One thing that often comes up as a question on sites explaining my dad is whether he was ever a full-time employee at Technos Japan. I don't think he ever was. He was a freelancer—what you'd call a mercenary. On that note, from my childhood memories of health insurance cards, I was always covered as a dependent under national health insurance, which supports that. If he'd been full-time, it would've been under the company's social health insurance plan...
Recalling the production schedules back then, it was probably in this order: Kunio-kun → Dodgeball Bu → Monty → Battle of Olympus → Vegas something-or-other. And rather than finishing one and moving to the next, multiple projects probably overlapped a bit; I suspect he started getting into the Olympus planning while working on Monty.
Because, as I wrote last time, the Famicom + Disk System development setup was already complete by Monty, so for Olympus too, he'd work on data via PC and transfer it somehow to the Famicom Disk System's RAM adapter for testing on real hardware.
He'd connect the hardware to the TV to play the sounds, but I remember the screen staying pitch black the whole time it was playing. Very development-tool-like behavior.
And here's a little episode: Toward the end of development, while checking the ending theme on real hardware, my dad said he'd listened to the track he'd composed so much himself that he couldn't judge it anymore. So he just left the ending theme looping nonstop and told us to let him know if anything sounded off.
I was taking piano lessons at the time, but I was far from understanding the essence of music, so all I said was, "Sounds good to me?" But then my mom chimed in with, "The broken chords in the B-section are off by a half-step," and when my dad checked the data, sure enough, they were misaligned. My mom had dabbled in electronic organ since her student days, so she had a good ear.
This ending track is an arrangement of the main theme in major key. It matches the graphics of a beautiful sunrise at dawn, and I learned from it, "Oh, so that's a way to do it."
For someone who's studied music, refrains on the main melody might seem like a totally standard technique with tons of examples, but for a kid with little musical experience, it was a shocking bit of staging.
The title starts with the grim event of your lover being kidnapped. It sets a minor-key theme full of melancholy sadness, refrains it when a message from your lover arrives during the story, and then, after defeating the arch-enemy as the sun rises, flips it completely—taking that theme you've heard hammered home so many times and playing it in major key, bright and full of hope.
The game or story progression integrated with the music. That was my primal experience of understanding it bodily.
On this project, as I wrote before, why did my dad—who was so strict about NDAs—show me the planning documents? And not just once, but leaving them right there on the bookshelf like, "Here, you can read this."
Folks who remember the late-'80s Famicom boom probably know that "strategy guides" were massive bestsellers, stacked high in bookstores. I couldn't play Famicom at home, so I read a ton of strategy guides, and that's probably what turned me into an otaku with a thing for "planning" and "specs."
He must've seen that in me and wanted to show me a "real planning doc" to hone my imagination and such.
The planning doc titled "Legend of Love" was a bit embarrassing for elementary-school me (I mean, "love"? So over-the-top), but that thick stack of copy paper detailing the story, character breakdowns, button-press behaviors, item effects, stage gimmicks... etc., etc., was absolutely worth devouring.
I won't budge on the theme song / ending song being gems, but if I had to pick just one more track, it'd be "Crete." It's perfect for groping through the labyrinth, lost, toward the room where the Minotaur lies in wait.
No, the melody of "Petiotis," blending tension and lyricism, is pretty tempting too...
I hear there's a Game Boy version overseas... I'd love to carry it around and listen anytime.
Probably next time, I'll write about Ultima IV (FC), or maybe Ultima V or VI.
--Doommaster1994 (talk) 15:47, 13 February 2026 (EST)
Tokoro-san no Mamoru mo Semeru mo/Paris-Dakar Rally Special/Elysion (FC)
Game Music and Dad's Stories. This time, it's "Tokoro-san no Mamorumo Semerumo," "Paris-Dakar Rally 🛞 Special," and "Elysion."
"Tokoro-san ~" is, as the title suggests, composed by George Tokoro himself, and not only that—he also handled the character designs and world-building.
Regarding the weapons being water guns, I remember Dad saying back then, "It's good that it doesn't involve shooting or killing people; the goal isn't to defeat enemies but to go rescue them."
Indeed, for example, I have no memory of Dad playing games with gunfight or war themes, so maybe he just wasn't into that kind of thing.
Dad was a big movie buff, so he must have watched plenty of action flicks and sci-fi war movies, but there must have been some line drawn between games where you're actively pulling the trigger yourself and movies that are just fictional stories you're watching from the sidelines.
As for games Dad played on his own, unrelated to development, they were pretty much just "Shanghai" or "Tetris" on the PC-98, and for RPGs, maybe something like "Black Onyx" back in the PC-8801 days?
Oh! And he played simulation games too—not Daissōsen, but more like Master of Monsters; maybe the fictional vibe suited him better.
For testing sound effects with FM synthesis, he created original games like simplified Invader-style ones, assigned effects to them, and used that to get a feel for the atmosphere.
In "Tokoro-san ~," the stage near the end has Okinawan-style music, and that's when Dad taught me about the "flute-extracted scale."
It's taking the standard do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do and removing the second note (fa) to get re and the sixth note (la) to get la, resulting in the Okinawan scale.
Furthermore, the game over theme "Love Is Over"—I think there probably wasn't sheet music for it, and the instruction was to adapt it as a parody song.
But he couldn't just input "Love Is Over" straight up, so he probably reworked it with a similar phrasing... So, if my memory's right, that would make the game over track in "Tokoro-san ~" the only one that's Dad's composition (?),
And one more thing he struggled with: the original stage BGM was too short. Yeah, listening to it now, it's pretty minimal indeed.
He couldn't just add phrases on his own, so he probably just inputted the data as-is.
Like the ones I mentioned before—"Hikaru GENJI Roller Panic," "Transformers: Headmasters," or "Ultima: The Path of the Holy"—he often worked as an input programmer on projects where there was sheet music for the original tunes.
For classical music, "Matsumoto Toru's Stock Market Victory Method" was also Dad's arrangement and sound programming. I think he might have worked on "Life Theater" too...
Anyway, next up is "Elysion." The overall musical style is close to "Battle of Olympus," but—and I hate to say it—the sound feels kinda thin. Like, the broken chords are weak, or channels 1 and 2 are clashing.
Thinking back to when Dad was working on it at home, he made demos on synth and played them there. I don't remember him playing Elysion tracks from the Famicom. So, probably, he'd make a demo, get the OK, and then head to the dev company to program it.
And since the sound driver was off-the-shelf, my theory is he couldn't get the sounds to play quite how he wanted.
For Elysion, the PC-98 version should only have beeps processed into SE—no full music. But the game itself is a pretty solid RPG. Rogue-like, with enemies moving one action for every step you take.
The Famicom version features character designs by Moto Hagio, and Dad did the music; the core gameplay is the same, but it really feels like a whole different game.
Wrapping up this time with "Paris-Dakar Rally 🛞 Special." We called it "Paridaka" for short.
The game bills itself as a rally but isn't just racing—it's got sponsor-hunting RPG elements, balloon-popping minigames, maze games, side-scrolling action, vertical-scrolling shooters(!), and then the races... It's packed to the brim.
In today's terms, the sheer freedom of the concept might get it labeled a "fool game," but the music is seriously on point. It shamelessly borrows the cool essence from the hot-blooded high school series. I bet the dev company ordered something "Kunio-kun-like."
The game's fun and the tunes are great, so definitely search up some playthrough videos!
Thanks as always for reading. Next time, I plan to write about something like Super Famicom's "Populous."
--Doommaster1994 (talk) 03:36, 27 February 2026 (EST)
