Nobuo Uematsu is 50 years old. 51 in a month. He can’t really believe it, either — but what’s even more unbelievable to him is that he’s spent nearly half of his life composing music for video games.

“I wanted to be a composer, but I had no way of becoming one,” Uematsu told Famitsu magazine in an interview published this week. “I had no connections, so I just bummed around my hometown of Hiyoshi [in Kanagawa prefecture]. This was before video games were really a part of most people’s lives. It just happened that Square’s office was in the neighborhood, and a friend of mine working part-time as a designer asked if I wanted work composing PC game music. I said yes and that was it. So you had someone who never had his music appreciated by anyone suddenly getting paid to compose music from dusk ’til dawn! It was so much fun that my twenties just whizzed on by.”

Uematsu, of course, would eventually find his name becoming synonymous with the Final Fantasy series — which had its up and down sides. “My quitting Square Enix [in October 2004] was one of the turning points of my life,” he said. “It’s true that commuting to their new offices in Shinjuku was annoying, and it’s also true that I was getting sick of working in an office. Really, I felt that people were putting me up on this pedestal as ‘the man behind Final Fantasy’ or something, and I didn’t like that much.”

Share This