Hirokazu Tanaka (田中宏和), also known as “Hip” Tanaka, joined Nintendo in 1980 and spent the following fifteen years defining the sonic character of the company’s most alien, most intimate, and most infectious games.
His early Famicom work - Balloon Fight, Excitebike, and Clu Clu Land (all 1984) - established him as a core member of Nintendo’s internal music team. But it was Metroid (Famicom Disk System, 1986) that revealed what he was truly capable of: an atmosphere-first approach that treated the NES sound chip not as an instrument to fill with melody, but as a space to inhabit with texture, drone, and deliberate silence.
In 1989, Tanaka’s arrangement of the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki” for Tetris Game Boy became one of the most-played pieces of music in human history. That same year he composed Super Mario Land and the psychedelic score of Mother (EarthBound Beginnings) - an RPG whose music was directed by Shigesato Itoi toward The Beatles and avant-garde pop.
His final major composing credit was as sound director on EarthBound (1994), working alongside Keiichi Suzuki. He later became president of Creatures Inc., the studio that helped develop the Pokémon games.
