Affiliation:
1. University of Hartford
Abstract
In the heyday of Nintendo’s 8-bit era in the 1980s, the limitations and affordances of the console’s audio capabilities led composers and programmers to new heights of creativity. Jun Chikuma (竹間 淳 or 竹間 ジュン) was one such composer who developed new compositional strategies, techniques, languages, and styles for this new medium. Her work often appears on “hidden gems of video game music” lists, but it has yet to be discussed in scholarly literature. Nor has Faxanadu (1987), itself considered by many an underrated classic. For this game, Chikuma created an unusually lengthy score comprising numerous distinct tracks, remarkably structured in modified arch form. Expanding on KC Collins’s (".fn_cite_year($collins_2007).
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