Underappreciated Composers Appreciation Thread

Cool thread

Iwadare's a good example, yeah. Lunar 1 has an excellent score, both in the SEGA CD and the PS1 versions of the game (PS1 kicks SEGA CD's score's butt though, in my book).


My vote would be for David Kneupper. His site can be found at http://www.kneuppermusic.com

As you can see, he's in Hollywood these days.

But he provided the foundation for a little known score, which happens to be excellent, and probably the best of its' kind (Mayan beat music, basically, with rock, funk, soul etc).

He composed for Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, which I just updated my site with (http://smc.sq7.org/pitfallcd).

If you look at the main page of my site, you'll see why I consider him underappreciated, aside from the fact that the game wasn't huge (taken from http://smc.sq7.org):

Quote:

The excellent Activision soundtrack is a 'soundtrack remake' from the Windows 95 release (the best release), based upon the original SNES game audio, composed by the very talented composer David Knuepper. If you like the music, please contact him! He loves talking about the old days and deserves most of the credit, but unfortunately his thunder was stolen by the company he was working for, Soundelux, who are credited for the SEGA CD/Windows 95 release (same audio in both) when they only 'arranged' his original work (if you listen to some of the SNES soundtracks floating around the web, you'll hear what I mean!).

Based on that premise, he's an underdog.


Simialrly, Gilles Douieb, who composed a similar (funnily enough) and equally excellent score for the two Coktel Vision games, Inca and Inca 2 (http://queststudios.com/quest/incacd/incacd.html), is underappreciated. It was widely thought until recently that the score was composed by an in-house composer who composed for most of Coktel's games.

This was Douieb's only VG score ever, and that's crazy, given how amazingly good it is. Although he is in a successful band in France anyway.



As for more mainstream composers, I think Apogee's Bobby Prince is probably underappreciated (how many of us hummed those tunes?), as is a lot of Western VGM composers.

I can't think of many underappreciated Japanese composers (although Iwadare's a good example), although I can think of lots of overappreciated ones

- Spike

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

John Pee - Not his real name (what is it with Japanese composers and bizarre psuedonyms?), he composed the lion's share of Treasure Hunter G and did a fine job with it. So let's hear some more!

Totally agree, I'm playing THG for the first time ever with my brother, and neither of us can believe how amazing the score is for a SNES score. I think it'd be fair to say it's right up there with Secret of Mana/Tales of Phantasia, which are spectacular scores (in my book).


I'd actually assumed THG was composed by Sakuraba.

- Spike

There's nowhere I can't reach.