Sadly, I myself didn’t get a chance to speak to the legend, but Ellie from GamesIndustry.biz certainly did.

The interview gives us an insight into ‘the now’ with Matsuura, focusing on his future projects as well as opinions on the current musical game ‘boom’ in the west with things like Singstar and Guitar Hero becoming all the rage.

Although he makes a good point that the Japanese have been playing games like these since the nineties, it’s interesting to note that they are mostly in an arcade setting. Sure, they have had Guitar Freaks, Pop’n'Music, Beatmania, Taiko Drum Master etc for a very long time but it isn’t in a home setting which allows things like Guitar Hero to have full length songs instead of having to cut them down to shorter samples to give everyone a fair turn.

Matsuura also says that he believes many modern game studios neglect working with music for the graphics aspect of game development and with the growing loss in CD sales he believes the two will come together in some way as time goes on.

You can read the article over at GamesIndustry.biz by clicking this link.

[This piece also posted on Rhythm Gamer]

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