Sonic the Hedgehog · Sega Genesis / Mega Drive · 1991 · Collect · Masato Nakamura
The bright, brief chime that plays when Sonic collects a gold ring — composed by Masato Nakamura of the band Dreams Come True — is one of the most frequently triggered sound effects in 16-bit gaming, its cheerful one-note punctuation arriving hundreds of times per level and maintaining its appeal through musical elegance rather than novelty.
Masato Nakamura was the bassist and principal composer for Dreams Come True, one of Japan's most successful pop groups, when Sega approached him to compose the soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog in 1990. Nakamura produced both the music and the sound effects for the game, working in studio recording sessions rather than through the in-game hardware tools that most console composers used. His background in pop music production gave him a different perspective on game audio than composers who had come up through the game industry. The ring collect sound reflects this background. Rather than a simple square wave chirp — the standard collect sound of NES-era design — Nakamura's ring sound is a warm, bright chime with a short but perceptible resonance. It is produced through the Genesis's YM2612 FM synthesis chip, which Nakamura programmed to produce a bell-like tone quite different from the raw metallic quality most FM synthesis sounds produced at the time. The sound has a musical quality that makes it pleasurable rather than merely functional. This was essential for its design purpose. In a typical Sonic level, the player collects dozens to hundreds of rings. A sound that was merely functional would become irritating through repetition at that frequency. Nakamura's ring sound is short enough to not intrude and pleasant enough that its repetition reinforces the pleasurable feedback loop of high-speed gameplay rather than interrupting it. The sound is timed to arrive at precisely the moment of contact and to decay before the next ring would typically be collected at full speed.
The design problem of a collect sound in Sonic the Hedgehog is unusual. In most games, collect sounds are heard infrequently enough that pleasant-but-simple designs work adequately. In Sonic, rings are the fundamental currency of survival — they replace the health meter, multiply through every environment — and a player moving at Sonic's maximum speed through a ring trail can trigger the collect sound ten or fifteen times per second. At that frequency, any irritant in the sound becomes amplified to unbearable levels.
Nakamura's solution was to make the sound musically correct — not just functional, but genuinely pleasant in the way that a well-tuned bell is pleasant. The chime quality has a natural warmth that does not fatigue. Its brevity means it triggers and clears before the next ring. Its pitch is high enough to cut through the game's music without being shrill. Every aspect of the sound is optimised for a situation that most sound designers have never had to consider: what a collect sound sounds like heard five hundred times in a row.
Nakamura's background in pop production shaped the Sonic soundtrack in ways that distinguished it from contemporary game audio. Pop music production in 1990 was focused on sound design that pleased listeners immediately and retained that pleasure through repetition — the exact qualities required of a game soundtrack that would play continuously for thirty-minute sessions. Nakamura brought a commercial musician's instincts about what made sounds pleasant to an industry that had traditionally approached audio from a technical perspective.
The YM2612 FM synthesis chip was capable of rich, complex timbres that most game composers of 1991 were not exploiting to their potential. Nakamura, approaching the hardware as a studio musician encountering an unfamiliar synthesiser, programmed it to produce sounds that resembled real acoustic instruments rather than the metallic electronic textures that FM synthesis typically produced. The ring sound's bell-like quality, the bass notes in the level music, and the percussion sounds in the soundtrack all reflect a different approach to the hardware than Sega's own composers were taking at the same time.