http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20...brandon_01.htm
You gotta sign up to read it, but thats not really a big deal. They just send you an email every so often.
The interview is cool. I like his thoughts on the Metroid music.
some intresting bits about it...
"In the era when ROM capacities were only 1K or 2K, you had to create all the tools by yourself. The switches that manifest addresses and data were placed side by side, so you have to write something like "1, 0, 0, 0, 1" literally by hand. Such prehistoric work makes me laugh every time I think about it."
"Then, sound designers in many studios started to compete with each other by creating upbeat melodies for game music. The pop-like, lilting tunes were everywhere.
The industry was delighted, but on the contrary, I wasn't happy with the trend, because those melodies weren't necessarily matched with the tastes and atmospheres that the games originally had.
The sound design for Metroid was, therefore, intended to be the antithesis for that trend. I had a concept that the music for Metroid should be created not as game music, but as music the players feel as if they were encountering a living creature. I wanted to create the sound without any distinctions between music and sound effects. The image I had was, 'Anything that comes out from the game is the sound that game makes.'"
Z-roe
