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Compendium Entry: Miki Higashino
When you ask an old school or enthusiast gamer what some excellent companies were in the 8 bit era for music and sound effects they will toss out a few names, Nintendo, Capcom, Tecmo, Square, Rare, Sega but I'm going to look at a composer from my personal favorite 8 bit soundtrack powerhouse, Konami.
Miki Higashino is another female composer with her background in piano compositions as was Yoko Shimomura. In her early video game career she got the chance to collaborate with the Konami Kukeiha Club, which is the awesome name of Konami's sound team. Basically she started straight at the top for classic arcade games.
The first game that Miki Higashino worked on is a wonderful and classic horizontal shooter known as Gradius from 1985.
The same year saw the release of Yie Ar Kung-Fu to the arcades and more Miki music. Higashino got the chance to continue her influence on the Gradius series a year later with the release of Salamander in the arcade.
She also got the chance to make her first non-arcade soundtrack, doing the music for Knightmare for the MSX home computer. She used this experience in the next year helping with the port of Salamander to the MSX.
Higashino and the Konami Kukeiha club just could not be stopped, but they did take two years separated after the MSX port of Salamander before they all met back up and decided to make some music for the original arcade release of Gradius III.
Miki Higashino and Mutsuhiko Izumi worked on both Gradius III (as well as others) and the arcade release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the year of 1989. The arcade release of TMNT remember, not the original NES game.
Izumi went on to do the soundtrack for Konami's arcade TMNT follow up, the amazing Turtles in Time, by himself.
Miki started the 1990s by being on the music team for the interesting arcade game Surprise Attack. In 1992 she came back to work on the team for Contra III: Alien Wars. This was her first foray outside of the arcade since the MSX ports.
1993 saw another busy year for Miki. She did the limited soundtrack for the arcade game Premier Soccer, lead the composing team for manga licensed RPG Moryo Senki MADARA 2 for the Super Famicom (same team as Contra III). Finally, she also lead the team for the Mega Drive/Genesis port of TMNT: Tournament Fighters.
The following year sees her branching out even more as she composes the music for another sports game, Double Dribble: The Playoff Edition for the MD/Genesis by herself and works on the team that creates the soundtrack for the PC Engine dating sim Tokimeki Memorial.
The very middle of the 1990s, 1995 that is, was filled with only one soundtrack with work by Miki. Konami wanted a team to make a soundtrack for their take on the classic console based RPG. So Miki, along with a team of others composed the music for Suikoden.
She also took on the mighty role of the soundtrack for Suikoden's sequel largely on her own, only 8 of the 105 songs on Suikoden II's massive sequel were not completely made by her alone or at all.
Between the Suikodens she was a member of the teams behind the music for Vandal Hearts and her first work outside Konami, Moon: Remix RPG Adventure.
The 21st century began with Miki and Keiko Fukami continuing their work after Suikoden II and releasing the soundtracks for the visual novels Genso Suikogaiden Vol. 1 and 2 in and 2000 and 2001 respectively.
She left Konami and the industry completely for maternity leave after being a major force in the first four released games in Konami's Suikoden world, building the musical love from Gradius, having a major hand in the TMNT arcade experiences, among many other influences. Many of Konami's biggest arcade successes and cult console classics have seen Miki Higashino working some musical magic up behind the scenes along with a team just as dedicated as her.
Since returning from her maternity leave Miki has only been able to collaborate with Yasunori Mitsuda on the soundtrack for 10,000 Bullets, and on Pop'n Music: Adventure in 2007.
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