Twitter: Musical Memories (2021)

Title: Musical Memories

Source: Sugimori Masakazu's Twitter

Summary: On May 22, 2021, Sugimori Masakazu wrote a few tweets regarding his role in the development of the very first Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) game on the GameBoy Advance. As the composer of the soundtrack of the first game in the series, he was responsible for a large part of the atmosphere of the first game. In this short series of tweets, Sugimori talks about how he basically had complete freedom over the soundtrack, but what's even more interesting is the reveal by Sugimori how it was Mori Atsushi, who worked on the sound effects of the game, who made many sound-related series staples possible in the first place.

In the translation below, each paragraph is a seperate tweet. 

I watched two of Kondō Hiroyuki’s Gyakuten Saiban streams after another. He was still doing them! (I thought it had ended with Golden Week lol). Episode 3, where Tonosaman (The Steel Samurai) first appears is really intense lol. By the way, the theme of Tonosaman is the only song created for Gyakuten Saiban 1 (Ace Attorney GBA) everyone on the development team unanimously gave the OK sign. Eh? What about the other songs? Hahaha… (said the person who composed every track as he liked and added them to the game as he liked). [Source]

By the way the first song I created was the normal investigation theme. The development circumstances were really difficult at that time, so I had a lot of trouble with it. We didn’t have actual GBAs at Capcom then, just bare motherboards. We’d put a speaker on it, a small one. But it’s not like you could hear anything without box resonance lol (especially the lower sounds). [Source]

So everyone became mad at me because we couldn’t hear a thing. So I maxed out the volume and velocity (and we still couldn’t hear anything). Then one day the real thing was delivered and we could finally listen to the music properly with the speaker resonance. But then they got mad at me because now the sound was clipping lol. [Source]

To be honest, up to the third song, the problem I had weren't about whether the track was good or not: I just couldn’t hear anything. Everyone working on a game, please be gentle to the sound people early on in the development process if the hardware isn’t ready yet. Our section can only put up a fight when the other sections have done their job and have prepared everything for us lol. [Source]

Have I ever mentioned the tremendous work Mr. Mori did for Gyakuten Saiban? (He was my senior who worked on sound effects and later my boss at my previous work).Without him, neither Gyakuten Saiban nor Ghost Trick would’ve existed the way they do. [Source]

In short, the snappy ringing sound effect, but also voices like “Hold it!” and “Objection!” didn’t exist in the game until Mr. Mori joined the team. The senior who worked on the sound effects before Mr. Mori had a policy of not using PCM (basically live sounds). Mr. Mori had to take over halfway into the project and started adding live sounds in the game, saying that if the people in charge didn’t like it that he’d take full responsibility for his actions. [Source]

Naturally, I made full use of this change in policy. With the PCM option initially not being an option at all, I had been mainly making the music using the PSG (programmable sound generator), but at the time it had only been my second year with the company and I had never touched a PSG before. There was no way I’d be able to use the PSG as good as my neighbors over at the Rockman (MegaMan) team lol. Add to that the development circumstances I wrote about earlier and I was honestly really struggling desperately. [Source]

It was at that time Mr. Mori came and said: “I’ll take full responsibility, so use the PCM all you want, don’t worry about the number of notes and just compose what you like.” It was like being given water in the desert, freed from the chains that bound me. So yes, I started making tracks the way I wanted. And then the programmer became angry at me. “Damn it, why are you using so much memory for your music suddenly!” [Source]

So I quickly went up to Mr. Mori and told him programming got angry at me (expecting him to stand up for me). But Mr. Mori said: ‘Well, apologize to them then.’

 

(΄◉◞౪◟◉｀) This was my face then.

Probably. I can laugh at it now though lol. [Source]

But it is an undeniable truth that the music and sound effects of Gyakuten Saiban that all of you know wouldn’t have existed without Mr. Mori. After he had added the voices and the sound effects, he said to me with a cool look on his face: “See how the atmosphere of the game changed completely? This is how you fight on your own ground.” All I thought was: “But I was the one they got angry at.” But what a great memory this became lol [Source]