Naoki Kodaka

Japan · Composer

The Sunsoft composer behind Blaster Master, Batman, Journey to Silius and the Albert Odyssey series.

Naoki Kodaka spent so much of his spare time in arcades that Sunsoft hired him, and he became the composer of many of the company's best-known games. His work for the NES includes Blaster Master (1988), Batman (1989), Fester's Quest (1989), Journey to Silius (1990) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), and he also scored Batman: The Video Game on the Mega Drive, Super Fantasy Zone (1992) and the Albert Odyssey series. Kodaka wrote his music on traditional sheet music, and Sunsoft's sound programmers, including Nobuyuki Hara, Shinichi Seya and Naohisa Morota, adapted it for the NES hardware. He retired from game music in 2002 to teach, first as a professor at Nagoya College of Music and later at Daido University, where he teaches music theory and computer music.