Junko Tamiya has said that she always liked playing music, but never knew it could be a career. She learned that Capcom's sound team had openings from her university. 'I learned about openings in the sound team at Capcom from my university,' she said in a 2014 interview. That is the whole story of how she began. There is no year for it in the interview.
At Capcom she was credited under a number of names. The best known is Gondamin. Asked why, she gave a flat answer: it was company policy at the time. The other composers called her Tami-chan. For a long time the people who played her music had only the aliases to go on.
One of her first big jobs was the Famicom version of Bionic Commando, in 1988. The arcade game already had two songs, and her supervisors asked for something similar. The composers who had written the arcade music told her to write what she wanted. She wrote it, using an MSX computer, a keyboard and the PCM sound the machine allowed, and she took her sense of the music from how the story differed from the arcade version.
Then came Strider in the arcades, in 1989. She wrote it on an MSX and a keyboard, with FM sound sources. The planner talked to her about emotions and feelings, and later described the picture the game was meant to give. It took her a long time to find music for that picture. She has said the first song was inspired by tubular bells. The main theme and the unusual rhythms came out of that search.
Sweet Home followed in 1989. The planners asked for scary music from the start, and she has said she was weak at horror scoring. So she did something practical. She listened to a horror film soundtrack, which she believes was Hellraiser. What she heard was scary, she said, but also quite beautiful. That gave her room to work, and the music for the game came from that room.
Little Nemo: The Dream Master came by what she called a change of plans. She was assigned to it while she was also working on Street Fighter 2010. The genre was new to her. For the opening theme she pictured an amusement park with a barrel organ, and she used distant waves and held notes to make it feel far away. By the interviewer's account she left Capcom in 1990, after those two games. Other sources give a later year.
After Capcom she kept working in music. Mostly she arranged music for live performances and wrote for the stage, and sometimes she produced Japanese classical music, working behind the scenes. For about twenty-four years she was away from the game world, and the people who knew her music did not know where she was.
In 2014 she went to BitSummit with other former Capcom composers. She said it felt like a gathering of very genuine people. She agreed to contribute to Project Light, an album made with former Capcom musicians. Someone may hand you tomorrow the one job you are weakest at. What will you put on first, to listen to?