In a filmed conversation posted in July 2026, Nobuo Uematsu plays a piece of music from the first Final Fantasy and says, in Japanese, that it is a song he really did make in about fifteen minutes. The man across from him laughs. He is the American musician Jon Batiste, and he has come to talk about the music that shaped him.
Batiste says he was ten years old in 1997. He did not yet write music. He would hear something from the games, play it back on a Kawai keyboard, and then change a few of the notes. That, he says, is how he first thought about composing: you start by copying, and then you try to make your own version of the thing. Uematsu listens to this from the other side of the table. The music being copied on that keyboard was his.
Uematsu tells Batiste how he began. It was more than forty years ago, he says, and game music was not yet a kind of music. Nobody expected to make a living from it. The professionals paid it no attention, so the work went to an amateur like him. 'It was a very lucky time,' he says.
Batiste asks whether he was told what to write, or left free. At the beginning, Uematsu says, they would ask for something like this or like that. Later they let him decide. Then Batiste asks how long a game took. Uematsu names King's Knight, a Square game from 1986: about two weeks, he thinks, because there were only six or seven songs. Batiste asks about Final Fantasy VII. 'Seven,' Uematsu says, 'might have taken about a year.'
That game came out in Japan on January 31, 1997. Its score ran on a PlayStation that gave the music sixteen sound channels, and Uematsu has said elsewhere that he wanted it to fit each scene like a film soundtrack. In the conversation he does not describe any of that. He describes the work itself. He plays the tune on a piano first, then enters it into the computer one note at a time: an eighth note C, an eighth note D, a sixteenth note D. He says it plainly and Batiste's eyes widen. Asked how the hard ones got finished, Uematsu says they came when the deadline got close.
Batiste asks how he writes for a game. Does he think about the characters and their backstory, or does he just follow what feels right? Uematsu answers about the first part. He reads the scenario and looks at the character artwork, and he reads over and over how each character speaks. Then he says that wanting to write a gentle melody is probably always somewhere in his head. Batiste jokes that some of what he has heard is not gentle at all. Uematsu laughs and agrees: he writes those too.
He does not talk about training, because he has none. He says it is a strange thing, almost crazy, that the play of someone who never studied or trained should reach people. He wonders whether the world has gone a little odd.
Batiste says Uematsu has no idea where music is supposed to come from, and means it as praise. Uematsu takes it as true. Nobody taught him a rule about what he must do, he says, and there is none inside him either, so he can go anywhere, freely.
A song made in fifteen minutes and a score that took a year sit in the same catalogue, and a ten-year-old with a keyboard could not have told you which was which. The length of the work and the reach of the work were counted on different clocks. Of the things you made in a hurry, which one is playing in someone's room right now?