Rika Muranaka

• 1. Introduction

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  Rika Muranaka spent almost two decades composing music for Hideo Kojima without ever being allowed to write English lyrics for him. Kojima refused to hear song lyrics in Metal Gear Solid written in English, or in any other language he personally understood. The restriction held for years, spanning several entries in the series.

  What was a director protecting by keeping his own soundtrack unintelligible to him? That question sits inside a career most listeners have never heard in full. How did a composer end up scoring one of gaming's longest-running franchises? What convinced a Hollywood film composer to cross into an industry that many people at the time considered artistically unserious? And why did her name resurface decades later in interviews about virtual reality, recorded at the height of a global pandemic?

• 2. Leaving Tokyo For Chicago

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  During her teens, Rika Muranaka left Tokyo to study jazz piano with Alan Swain, a jazz pianist and author, in Chicago. She began writing music of her own at sixteen, though at first strictly for herself.

  Maine East High School in Park Ridge granted her a diploma in 1979, and Chicago's Northeastern Illinois University followed after that. Back in Japan, Columbia Records, a major record label there, offered her a deal in 1992 that produced four albums.

  Slice of Life, her 1992 debut album, featured vocalists Dwight Dukes, Cynthia Harrell and Stephanie B. It came out of a collaboration with Michael Caruso, a Grammy-nominated songwriter. Commercial work filled the years around it too: jingles for advertising, pieces for the Japanese government, and demos for multimedia companies.

  She once summed up that stretch of her career bluntly, saying she "was on TV, doing everything from jingles to writing music for artists." Casio brought her in to help develop pre-programmed beats and sounds for its electronic keyboards, and she also produced music for educational textbooks and materials. Her fascination with the game industry pulled her toward Konami in the 1990s, a time when studios rarely hired composers with formal training.

• 3. Becoming Kojima's Mind Reader

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  "Everyone thought that video game music was simple and not so good," Rika Muranaka said, describing the industry she wanted to change from within. Her first projects at Konami were scores for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the horror game Silent Hill. She worked alongside Japanese video game composer Akira Yamaoka on both.

  That work opened the door to composing for Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series. Konami was a small company at the time, and the original development team numbered only about twenty people, none of whom expected the game to become so successful.

  Muranaka has described having to act as a "mind reader" throughout the project, since she never knew the storyline or where a given track would eventually play. Kojima instead gave her a narrow brief: five patterns for action, five for sneaking and five for ambient music.

  When Rika Muranaka suggested writing one song in Gaelic, Kojima's answer was blunt: "What the hell is Gaelic?" That same insistence on control reached beyond the notes and lyrics, into decisions about who actually made the music real.

• 4. Bringing Hollywood Into The Studio

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  While composing for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Rika Muranaka brought British film composer Harry Gregson-Williams into the video game industry. It was his first work on a game, and Muranaka believes the move helped set a trend of film composers moving into game music.

  Across her years at Konami, Rika Muranaka wrote music and lyrics for the Metal Gear Solid series, then produced and edited the recordings herself. She also arranged the budget and hired the musicians and orchestra needed to record each score. Jazz musicians Gerald Albright, Kevin Eubanks and Hubert Laws were among the players she brought in for the series.

  Producing the games' music was one part of her work. Writing for a different medium entirely would soon pull at her just as strongly.

• 5. Trading Consoles For Screens

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  "In games, the music has to fit within a game," Rika Muranaka once explained, noting that every track needed "a transition every 30 seconds." Despite her fondness for that discipline, she gradually developed a passion for composing music for film, television and animation instead.

  Tracks also had to be "loopable so they can cut or stretch the audio to sync to the game visuals." Film never imposed that same constraint on her. Film gave her something different: a scene and a time code that let her "fit the music perfectly within a scene."

  After ending her working relationship with Konami, Rika Muranaka moved into projects of her own. These included the reality show Hollywood Dream and her business RnD Entertainment. Both grew out of a collaboration with Damien "E-Love" Matthias, a Grammy and American Music Award winning music producer. Alongside them, she kept composing and producing music for films.

• 6. A Catalog Beyond Metal Gear

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  A single instrumental cue called "Cosmic Mudra" turned up again and again across American television. It scored episodes of Property Wars, America's Next Top Model and MTV's Rob and Big. It also appeared in a segment of NFL In Their Own Words about Junior Seau.

  Different guest singers gave voice to her Metal Gear Solid themes over the years. Aoife Ní Fhearraigh sang "The Best Is Yet to Come" on the original 1998 soundtrack. Elise Fiorillo later voiced "Don't Be Afraid" for Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in 2004.

  Snake Eater's title theme itself was written by Norihiko Hibino, with Muranaka producing and arranging the track rather than composing it. On Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, she wrote "I Am the Wind" together with Jeff Lorber. Tony Haynes wrote the lyrics, and Cynthia Harrell sang the vocals. Tony Haynes also wrote the lyrics for "Reminisce a While," her contribution to the Master Mosquiton anime soundtrack that same year.

  In 1997 she also directed and produced music and scripts for a run of interactive CD-ROM titles aimed at children. These included Let's Play U Can Chat Too! and My First Day of School!

  She stepped outside music entirely for Polypore, a 2013 film credited as assistant location scout and Japanese translation assistant. In 1996 she had already recorded three piano solo albums: Love Letters to Heaven, Summer of '79 and Enchante. Gerald Albright played saxophone on all three, and Paul Jackson Jr. played guitar.

  By 2014, she was producing the soundtrack for Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, more than two decades after her first Konami credit.

• 7. A Global Spotlight

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  In May 2020, Rika Muranaka was featured in the Visual Collaborative Polaris catalog. The feature ran in a series called TwentyEightyFour, released at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  She spoke in that interview about her collaborations and about virtual reality. Les Nubians and Dakore Akande shared those same pages of TwentyEightyFour, discussing their own work alongside hers. Virtual reality, not any video game score, was the subject Rika Muranaka chose to speak about that month.