May 31, 2022 was Junichi Masuda's last day as a managing director of Game Freak. The next morning, June 1, he started a new job at The Pokémon Company, with the title Chief Creative Fellow. He had been with the studio since it was formed in 1989. That is about thirty-three years.
He had come in as the music person. Before Pokémon, he wrote for Pulseman on the Mega Drive and for Yoshi's Egg. In a 2014 interview he said that for Yoshi's Egg he programmed, on his own, a feature where the icons dance to the music. Even then, the composer was also the one who wrote the code.
Pokémon Red and Green took around six years to finish. They came out in Japan on February 27, 1996. For the first game, Masuda made music at home on a Commodore Amiga. The Game Boy could not read what the Amiga made, so he wrote a tool to carry it over. In his words: 'I even created a converter program for it.'
The Game Boy gave him very little room. The sound and the music had to fit in the same cartridge as everything else. He told Game Informer he had to make a lot of changes to reduce the byte size of the sound and music files. Besides the songs, he was also asked for the cries of the creatures.
He described how he works in plain terms. He thinks of the melody first, then imagines the bass and the drums. He cannot use a piano to find a new sound. He needs to be alone. For the music of Viridian Forest, he said: 'I was just playing by feeling.' He also said he could not think about the music and the gameplay at the same time.
He also thought about what each piece of music should not do. Battle music should not feel too dangerous, he said, because the player may catch the creature on screen. And 'it's not a battle between Trainers — it's a battle between Pokémon.' The forests and caves could be eerie. The towns had to stay simple, with a melody you could recognize.
Over the next years his name moved from the sound credits to the director's chair: Ruby and Sapphire, Diamond and Pearl, X and Y. The 2014 interview already shows the old habits. He still names Pewter City as a track he really worked hard on. He added that he probably could not recreate it now.
In the announcement of June 2022, The Pokémon Company said he would use his deep understanding of the Pokémon brand to develop new services and products. Masuda's own closing line was short: he appreciated continued support in his new role. The songs he wrote on an Amiga in the nineties are still in the games. What would you do with your own first small tool, if it turned out to carry a whole world?