Japan · Born 1969 · Composer & Sound Programmer
Wrote his own sound driver as a teenager, then gave the strategy RPG its orchestral voice with Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics, before scoring Radiant Silvergun and Vagrant Story.
Hitoshi Sakimoto was born in Tokyo on 26 February 1969 and began composing for games at sixteen. His professional debut came in 1988 with Revolter, for which he also wrote a sound driver, Terpsichorean, that was later used in many Japanese games of the early 1990s. That technical background shaped his music: Sakimoto knew how to make limited sound hardware produce dense, layered, orchestral-sounding arrangements. His first solo score was Bubble Ghost (1990), and he worked frequently with fellow composer Masaharu Iwata, beginning with the PC Engine shooter Magical Chase (1991). His reputation was made by Quest's strategy RPGs. Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (1993) and Tactics Ogre (1995) gave the genre a grand, martial and melancholy sound, and when Tactics Ogre's director Yasumi Matsuno moved to Square, Sakimoto and Iwata scored Final Fantasy Tactics (1997). He also wrote the soundtrack for Treasure's shooter Radiant Silvergun (1998), then Matsuno's Vagrant Story (2000) and Final Fantasy XII (2006). After leaving Square in 2000, Sakimoto founded his own music production company, Basiscape, in October 2002, with Iwata and Manabu Namiki among its first members. The studio has since scored a long list of games, carrying the dense, orchestral approach Sakimoto developed on 16-bit hardware into the modern era.