That's a Fantasy
For my birthday this year, I'm going to meet Nobuo Uematsu. This is a man who shaped the music of my childhood. Even though I didn't own a real Final Fantasy game until college, the iconic music of Final Fantasy "1", "2", and "3" haunted my dreams.
I played little bits of Final Fantasy while I was in Elementary school, when visiting friends' houses, and I always wanted to play more and more. My initial forays into Dungeons and Dragons with my peers were, naturally, modeled after the imps and wolves of Final Fantasy. I saw snippets of Final Fantasy "2" on demo reels at Babbages (remember Babbages?), and finally got a taste of the music while I was playing Super Mario RPG. After I watched Mike and Dustin playing Final Fantasy "3" in high school, with that rockin' battle theme, I broke down and played all three games on emulator, in reverse order (3, 2, 1). The brilliance! At that time, MP3s were still considered huge downloads--I was dealing with a 56.6k modem!--so I found a winamp plugin that played SNES soundfiles directly. Small filesize and authentic! That's also when I played fan-translated versions of Final Fantasy 5, half of the REAL Final Fantasy 2, and the opening section of the REAL Final Fantasy 3.
I spent a lot of time playing videogames growing up, but it was the music that stuck around whenever I turned a console off. Koji Kondo, Hip Tanaka, and Nobuo Uematsu were the composers of my favorite childhood memories.
I played little bits of Final Fantasy while I was in Elementary school, when visiting friends' houses, and I always wanted to play more and more. My initial forays into Dungeons and Dragons with my peers were, naturally, modeled after the imps and wolves of Final Fantasy. I saw snippets of Final Fantasy "2" on demo reels at Babbages (remember Babbages?), and finally got a taste of the music while I was playing Super Mario RPG. After I watched Mike and Dustin playing Final Fantasy "3" in high school, with that rockin' battle theme, I broke down and played all three games on emulator, in reverse order (3, 2, 1). The brilliance! At that time, MP3s were still considered huge downloads--I was dealing with a 56.6k modem!--so I found a winamp plugin that played SNES soundfiles directly. Small filesize and authentic! That's also when I played fan-translated versions of Final Fantasy 5, half of the REAL Final Fantasy 2, and the opening section of the REAL Final Fantasy 3.
I spent a lot of time playing videogames growing up, but it was the music that stuck around whenever I turned a console off. Koji Kondo, Hip Tanaka, and Nobuo Uematsu were the composers of my favorite childhood memories.