Game info: PlayStation DataCenter
Listening: CD audio + 2 extracted audio files
Credits
Sound Design: YmoH.S (Hitoshi Sakimoto)
Composer: Kenichi Koyano
Info
Kenichi Koyano is an interesting guy who’s had a long career occasionally composing for some completely random, mostly obscure video games, one of which I posted about last month! He’s been freelance for a long time—in fact I’m not sure he was ever actually employed by a video game company—and for more than 20 years he wrote a monthly column for DTM Magazine, a music production magazine (“DTM” is an initialism for “desktop music,” a Japanese term broadly referring to all music produced with a computer). He also gives college lectures and private lessons on music production, composition, etc.
I mostly associate Koyano with the music he contributed to several games by Raizing in the late ’90s: lots of cool, proggy rompler tracks which were very appropriate for the fighting and shmup games they were making. But this game is about horse racing, which calls for a more chill and stately soundtrack, so he couldn’t really get away with that kind of music here.
Except he kind of did??? While you could indeed call the soundtrack mostly chill and stately, a number of tracks feature shmuppy chord changes that you’ll find all over his other works, and some of his other compositional hallmarks like atonal runs are occasionally sprinkled in there too. So while there’s no rock organ or random time changes, a lot of the songs are still pretty easily identifiable as Koyano to me. This soundtrack is cool lmao
Recommended tracks:
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“Name Select” is the track that sounds most like it was ripped directly from a shmup, albeit a really cute one
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“VS Minai” is one of the funkier tracks from the game, just wanted to show off that there’s some music with decidedly less horse racing vibes than the others
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“Database” has a sicko mode rising progression at 0:39, and also has an extra beat right before the loop, which is a classic Koyano move
(track titles are unofficial)
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