Years after the game was finished, Harumi Fujita looked at the credits list for Gargoyle's Quest and her name was not on it. She said it was quite shocking when she realized. She had written music for that Game Boy cartridge. It was also the last game she worked on at Capcom.
She had come to games sideways. In 1984 SNK hired her as a designer, and only afterward learned that she was a composer. She had been writing music since she was seventeen, as a hobby. There was no game-music software and no one to teach her, so at SNK she entered notes as numbers and worked out for herself how a sound chip could come close to a piano or a trumpet. About a year later she moved to Capcom.
At Capcom she worked on sound effects and tones for Ghosts 'n Goblins, then on music. For Bionic Commando she and Tamayo Kawamoto split the songs, one taking the first half and one the second. She called it a kind of competing with each other. Her producer, Tokuro Fujiwara, asked for music that was catchy and that people would not get tired of hearing.
Gargoyle's Quest came in 1990, on a handheld with a handful of tones. Yoko Shimomura had just joined Capcom. Fujita says she wrote about two songs for it, and that she thinks the one called Dark Road was hers. Kawamoto, she says, may have written one or two as well. She told one interviewer that Baroque was easy to reproduce with three tones, and that rock was harder. She worked on the thickness of the chords until it sounded heavy.
Mega Man 3 came the same year. She wrote the Gemini Man and Needle Man stages and the staff roll. Then she stopped, halfway through development. In her words, as translated by the interviewer, she had to drop out in the middle of development and leave the company to give birth to her child. Yasuaki Fujita, no relation, finished the rest of the score.
She did not stop working. She became a freelancer, and the designer of Gargoyle's Quest, Kenshi Naruse, approached her when he founded Ukiyotei. Years later, when Tokuro Fujiwara started his own company, she went to him herself and asked him to use her somehow. That led to Tomba! in 1997. In another interview she described a birth in plain steps: five days in the hospital, two days of sleep at home, then back to work.
In 2020 her name appeared in the credits of Streets of Rage 4, for the music of two stages. A track called Full Circle, released on Brave Wave's album Giants, came from Fujita, Yasuaki Fujita, and one more person. The mixer was her son. He is the child she was expecting when she left Mega Man 3.
Asked how she composes, she gave a short answer. When she writes music, she said, she relies only on the feelings and thoughts that arise naturally within her. The credits list for Gargoyle's Quest does not say that. The music does.
How much of what you have made is being carried by people who never learned your name?