In 1984, Harumi Fujita sat in front of a hexadecimal computer at SNK's office in Osaka. In front of her was a manual for a PSG sound chip. There was no software to compose music. There was no one who could teach her how. She was told to make sound for a game called Mad Crasher. She had graduated from design school. She knew music. But game music was not yet a profession anyone had defined.
She was born in Tondabayashi, Osaka, in 1961. Her father had a habit of playing records at home — all kinds, no fixed genre. She listened. Years later, she would say that this habit of hearing many different kinds of sound, without being locked into one style, became the foundation for making game music that had no precedent.
At SNK, she worked like a programmer. She input numbers in hexadecimal. She had to figure out, by herself, how to use the PSG sound source chip to make sounds that came as close as possible to a piano, or a trumpet, or something else she heard in her head. She remained at SNK for a year. She later said she enjoyed discovering things that no other person had done yet.
In 1985, she moved to Capcom. The company was a young arcade maker competing in a crowded market. She joined as one of the company's first dedicated composers, alongside Tamayo Kawamoto and Ayako Mori — at a time when game sound was not yet recognized as a field that needed dedicated musicians. The hardware could play only a few sounds at once. There were still no established job titles. She accepted the work.
She composed for Bionic Commando in 1987, working with Kawamoto — one person would make the first half of a song, the other the second half. She composed for Strider, Final Fight, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers. She became a member of Capcom's internal band, Alph Lyla. While composing for Mega Man 3 in 1990, she left Capcom to become a freelancer due to maternity leave. She completed only three songs for that game. The rest were finished by Yasuaki Fujita, who was not related to her.
She continued to work as a freelance composer, contributing to the game industry into the late 1990s. In 2014, she joined Brave Wave Productions and reunited with several colleagues from Capcom. She composed songs for Streets of Rage 4. In recent years, under the name 'Okan-P,' she opened a TikTok channel where she composes music on the spot. The videos became popular.
It has been forty years since she sat in front of that hexadecimal computer. The tools exist now. The job titles exist now. The teachers exist now. None of them existed when she started. She made the first sound anyway.
When the road has no map, and the door has no manual — what do you pick up first?