Kenji Yamamoto (s)
 

I've always been much fond of the Dragon Ball / Z arrange albums by Kenji Yamamoto. They've got that eclectic and rocky thing that I love in early VGM albums.

I've also always been quite surprised that the same person was apparently behind the music from Metroid, but never gave it much attention.

The other day though, while checking last.fm, I felt like making sure and checked GMCL2. Here's what I found:

http://ng-stg.hp.infoseek.co.jp/gm/name/ya.html

So yep, it would seem there are in fact two VGM composers of the same era whose names romanize to Kenji Yamamoto.

One, 山本健誌, is (was?) a Nintendo employee, and is responsible for the compositions of the Metroid and Famicom Tantei Club series, or also to classics like Mike Tyson Punch Out.

The other is 山本健司 and has been doing the music to most of Bandai's DBZ fighting games and other DB/Z games. He also produced arranged albums to the majority of those.

Brought to you by The More You Know - VGM Edtion ~

=)

edit: as always, snesmusic was in the known. ;)

Very interesting, but that makes the guy less cool. :(

Still, that does explain why his work consisted of nothing but Nintendo games and, randomly, a bunch of Dragonball games.

Excite Truck, released last year, was scored by Masaru Tajima and a Kenji Yamamoto, so I'd assume he's still with Nintendo. The music is quite ROCK'N, so its style is more in line with the DB Yamamoto, but the game was published by Nintendo and the Nintendo Yamamoto's worked with Tajima before (Virtual Pinball <3), so I'd say it's more likely the Nintendo one.

Yeah, it's particularly interesting in the way that both are very talented and do have common traits, even if they remain quite discernible. Cool to know both are still active, too.

Someone should edit wikipedia, but I hate doing that. ;_;

Their Kanji names are different, the Nintendo Kenji Yamamoto has nothing (nada, zilch) to do with the Dragonball Kenji Yamamoto. (Nintendo forbid its employees to do work outside Nintendo anyway, so if you see one outside s/he either left Nintendo or it's someone else.)

Edit: What Kahori wrote

I'm on it.

Additional Spam:
Done.

Well done. =D

Can't wait for the upcoming Slightly Dark release btw, which should be one the last 2 missing DB/Z Yamamoto's arranged albums.

Also, an interesting link.

I went ahead and edited Nintendo-Kenji's wiki entry with the rest of the games listed at GMCL - even though their listings never struck me as the most reliable.

edit: Did some editing on the other one as well.