Masuda details his process for making Pokemon music

A portion of a Game Informer interview with Junichi Masuda...

GI: Can you talk about your process a little bit, do you sit down with the goal in mind of writing music or do you just wait for inspiration to strike as you go about your day?

JM: One of the important elements is that I have to be alone. Most of the time when I'm with other people, I'm usually talking, so it's kind of hard to hum a new song [laughs]. Also, when it comes to gameplay ideas and musical ideas, I find that I have to separate the two. I can't think of both simultaneously. I'll choose to think about one or the other for a full day. Once I have that focus, the inspiration will come at times throughout the day. But that focus is what's important.

When it comes to the actual process, I think everyone's different, but for me, it just kind of starts in my head. I can't play the piano to try and come up with a new sound, for example [laughs]. Often, I think of the melody first, and then come up with the bass and the drums all in my head. Sometimes I'll have the whole song in my mind and I'll just sit down at the computer and all I have to do is enter it in.

GI: Can you describe your mood and the setting in which you composed the music for the first Pokémon game?

JM: Of course I worked on the music at our office, but a lot of my composing for the first game was done at home. I had a Commodore Amiga computer at home on which I would create music. I even created a converter program for it, so I could bring the music I created into the office and play it on the Game Boy. I also had a lot of instruments at home, and we didn't have any at the office. I had like five keyboards (even though I couldn't play them) and synthesizers at home, so it was much more suited to creating music than the office.

In terms of mood, well, we spent around six years before completing the game, so, near the end, I was really just eager for it to be finished. I was already working on other projects, but would get requests to make certain songs and creature cries for Pokémon. I also had to make a lot of changes to reduce the byte size of the sound and music files so it would fit the limited space we had for the game, so it was a lot of work.