Capcom

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Capcom
Capcom.svg
Founded 1979
Headquarters Osaka, Japan
Website capcom.com
Other Names Japan Capsule Computers

Capcom (株式会社カプコン Kapukon Kabushikigaisha = Capcom Co., Ltd.) is one of the most successful video game companies in history releasing to the arcade, console, and PC markets. They have created several successful franchise like Mega Man, Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, Breath of Fire, and Monster Hunter.

Capcom is short for Japan CAPsule COMputers.

Games

Music Development

ARC

Capcom's early arcade titles used a variety of different sound drivers, before eventually adopting one designed by Toshio Arima as their standard driver circa 1985. After a couple of years, Yoshihiro Sakaguchi created an updated driver, which continued to be used in various forms (often customised by other programmers) up until around the early-mid 1990s.

NES

The majority of Capcom's NES games use a sound driver written by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi in 6502 assembly to produce sound on the audio processing unit of the CPU of the NES, the RP2A03. Composition required musicians to arrange their music into a custom Music Macro Language using hex values, a very tedious process. Capcom's sound driver was quite robust and yielded an distinctly identifiable sound.

It is unknown if the earliest NES Capcom games used the same driver, as the composers have given differing reports as to whether they used Sakaguchi's driver or one by Micronics programmer Kazuo Yagi, but it is known that the last few games use a sound driver created by Make Software rather than Sakaguchi's driver, possibly because it was easier to work with. This is very likely the case, as evidenced by Kenji Yoshida's comment seen in the staff credits of Mahjong Taisen, which uses the same sound driver:

“
I am Kenji Yoshida. Since this game, the sound tool has changed and become easier to use. I find it more enjoyable to tinker with the sound programming than to play the music.
„

SNES

Toshio Kajino designed the first sound driver used for Capcom's SNES games; his driver may have been a heavily modified version of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun driver. After about a year, this was replaced by a new driver designed by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi with assistance by Yasushi Ikeda, which was used for the remainder of their SNES games - with the exception of Street Fighter Alpha 2 (SNES), which for some reason uses a Kankichi-kun-derived driver, possibly programmed again by Kajino. Instrument samples were provided by Tatsuya Nishimura, who had just departed from TOSE.

N64

For Mega Man 64 and Magical Tetris Challenge, the company borrowed Hideaki Shimizu's sound driver from Nintendo.

On Resident Evil 2, they sub-contracted the audio production to Factor 5, who used their in-house MusyX sound engine.

Game Boy Advance

The company used Nintendo's MP2K sound engine.

Audio Personnel

These composers worked at Capcom:

Picture Gallery

Links

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