In 1984 Miki Higashino heard that Konami was looking for a part-time composer. She applied. She did not know what game music sounded like, so she made a few pieces of her own and handed them in. In her words, they got her the job.
She had come straight out of college, and she was one of the first people with formal music training to work on game music. The work was part-time at first, and in those early years the sound programmer had the final say on what went into a game. Many of her early pieces carried no credit, or only a nickname.
In 1985 came Gradius. The game is set in outer space, and she has said that outer space meant computers, robots and the future to her. So she wrote it fast and bright: the Lydian mode, odd meters, quick arpeggios. She has also said she did not expect it to be a hit. 'Nope, not at all!' was her answer when she was asked.
The years after that were mostly arcade and console work for Konami, including Salamander and Contra III. The machines gave her a few channels at a time. She wrote melodies for them anyway, and she later said that writing for three channels is a different job from writing for recorded sound.
In 1995 she wrote the music for Suikoden. Three years later she did Suikoden II, a game about war and the people who follow a leader into it. The score ran to 105 tracks. The sound staff for that game was two people: Higashino, and the programmer Kiyohiko Yamane. She did the background music, the sound effects, the orchestra recording and the testing. She explained it plainly: there was no budget for more people. The scores for the London recording session were sent from Tokyo by fax.
Her last scores for Konami were the Gensō Suikogaiden games, in 2000 and 2001. In 2001 she left the company on maternity leave. She told an interviewer that she was the kind of person who pours everything into work, and so had never managed to build a stable personal life. She wanted to build a home and become a mother, and to reset everything for a while.
In 2005 the composer Yoshitaka Murayama asked her to join Yasunori Mitsuda's game Tsukiyo ni Saraba. She said yes, and it was a short return. She was caring for a new baby and could not even sleep, and when the work was done she decided to stay away from it again for a time. Later she wrote one track for a charity CD, and little else is on record.
People still play Gradius for its first stage, and still talk about Suikoden II for its score. She was part of the team in both cases, and in one of them nearly the whole sound team. If you have been pouring everything into your work for as long as she did, what is the home you would stop to build, and when will you stop?