All My Friends

How the maker of Parappa The Rapper has made a career out of collaboration.

- Masaya Matsuura

Masaya Matsuura is the founding father of music games. While best known on these shores for the pioneering Parappa The Rapper, he’s renowned in Japan for his prog-pop group, Psy-S (pronounced ‘size’), which released 14 albums in 11 years, disbanding when Matsuura decided his future lay in games. He’s still committed to music, however – when we speak, he’s busy preparing for his next tour, which will take him from Tokyo to Osaka and finally Nottingham, where he’s a headline guest at All Your Bass, a new videogame-music festival being held at the National Videogame Arcade in January.

Matsuura, however, doesn’t see a distinction between these two seemingly discrete parts of his career. “The early ‘80s was a huge time, a revolution in using computers for music production,” he tells us. “I had this huge blue ocean in front of me, a chance to make a new kind of music using the computer – and the synthesiser, too, though that wasn’t computerised so much at the time.

“But there was another blue ocean – not one of tools, but friends. I had people around me who had used computers to do something else creative, that wasn’t music. At the beginning of my career, things like music, movies, TV shows, paintings… they were all in their own categories. But when computer technology came along, they all came together. There was no difference between them.”