HI everybody,
I was googling around, and accidentally found this brilliant discussion on this forum about best, and also underrated videogame (VG) music composers.

This thread will focus more on the underrated VG composers.

I think we all here must've known some legendary names in VG composers such as Nobuo Uematsu , Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Kanno, Koji Kondo.
These are all without doubt huge & legendary names in VG music,
I think most of us here would also agree that these names deserved their 'legendary' title, because of their musical genius & talents, shown in their music works.

But what usually happened with underrated VG composers?

You see,
I used to believe that talent is all that matters, in order to get one's name into highly appraised & legendary status.
but the more I research around, and found more interesting (& even greatly touching) underrated VG music , the more my pragmatism started to emerge, and started to conclude that, maybe talents is not all there is to change one's status into highly well-known & respectable, even legendary VG composers...
Maybe it's all also depending on the title of the games, whether it's a famous title (or company) or not, the marketing, etc.

for example, thorought my VG music researches history, I've finally become such a huge fan of Masashi Hamauzu (i really like his often-'jazzy ambience' style), and Naoki Kodaka (of Sega's Albert Odyssey..just beautiful touching soundtracks!) .
But I'm not even sure if these two brilliant VG composer have received a fitting spotlight & proper credits as they should have, if we were to talk about the musical aspects of the game alone.

my question is: what usually happened to these -i would say 'unfortunate' - underrated VG composers?
are they still usually keep active in the VG industry & community?
are they usually still keep composing, for more game titles ?
are they still going to get more composing projects, from many game developers, especially when their previous music talks for itself ?
or they usually would just dissapear , in dissapointment, when they couldn't live up to their own expectations ? or even more, when seeing their VG composer comrades rise highly to the top, while they're just still....underrated.

what do you guys think?

Well, unfortunately some composers only seem to work over one single game and then they never appear again. To be honest, there are so many that it would take some time to list them all.

As of what has become of them, I can't tell. :S Maybe they are still working in other music related projects, but not in the video game industry.

Maybe they just die.

I'm kind of a one game composer =\ I did Empires: Dawn of the Modern World and basically got out of the business because there wasn't enough money\work to sustain my family.


I work at Microsoft now as a test developor for Xbox. I do music on my spare time.

legendary VG composer title can only be reached from popular / well known games. If the game unpopular no matter how good the composer is, they tend to become underrated too. and not to be racist but Japanese composer tend to be more popular since most of popular game came from Japan, while western game even though it is a well known game, people doesn't care who the hell compose the soundtrack.

As for what happen to them, in some cases, its just that people don't know they still working because the game they work on is also unknown to people. Some of them even already works on many unknown game for so long before they work on a quite well known game and made to know to people as underrated VG composer, and this can occur other way around, from well known game to less known game or even game that only exist in Japan. Some of them also change into composing soundtrack for anime.

Kind of a disappointment that Matt Uelmen isn't doing Diablo III. Just isn't the same without him..some of the unreleased diablo 2 tracks were legendary. The music in the diablo 3 trailers are OK, but nothing approaching the genius that was Diablo I.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Uelmen