Akira Yamaoka Leaves Konami After 16 Years?!

He just used the 新堂敦士 (Atsushi Shindou) nickname. He just worked on the pop'n music series of games, creating around 12 songs.
His last song was on pop'n music 10 AC, when he was nearly sued because of lyrics plagiarism.
I'm pretty sure that Tyma can elaborate this a bit more anyways

Also Your Rain and You're Not Here were removed on DDR X IIRC.

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Pie confirmed it on the first page

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TaQ left Konami after IIDX 10, and made a big deal of letting everyone know that he was leaving to "further" his career, as a real DJ. He started DJing live, under the name "Bounce", and days after leaving Konami, announced he was releasing a new CD with long versions of a bunch of his Bemani songs, releasing it just before the IIDX 10th OST.

I really need to rip and upload some of his set from Pop'n Live 3, to explain just how popular Atsushi Shindou was, They guy went onstage after Naoki, Des-Row and TAKA, and got a response bigger than all 3 of them combined. Konami released 2 full albums of his Bemani songs, back when it was unthinkable for a Konami vocalist to get a record deal.

Konami even made MTV videos for his songs.

Think about the scale of that for a moment..

In the end, every time Konami put a new Pop'n Music game out, they'd release a single with the new Astushi song on it. Right after Pop'n Music 10 came out, Konami did a voting campaign for Pop'n Best Hits, which was pretty much guaranteed to contain all of the "Powerfolk" songs, but strangely left out all but 2 of them, when it was actually released. A few months after that, Pop'n Music 10 came out, which restored the missing songs. After that, all of his songs completely vanished, and rumors started spreading about lyric plagiarism, which Konami apparantly takes more seriously than musical plagiarism. He was completely removed from the Bemani series, and never mentioned again.

Whoops. You're right. But he does have other ones there like iFUTURELIST, i feel..., and INSIDE YOUR HEART. I don't think any of us know what the fate is for these songs in X2.

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Uh...Sad news..What a sad news
He's a great artist, my first Akira Yamaoka's song was "i feel", and it was awesome!

After exam, I'll be trying to FC or AA one of his song for a "goodbye"

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Famitsu reveals that Akira Yamaoka has joined Grasshoper Manufacture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_Manufacture

That's by the No More Heroes team!

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Yeah, that's about the only notable game series they've had. Reading through their game lists, most of the other games they've released have had poor reviews and lukewarm sales.

I wonder what Akira would compose if No More Heroes 3 would be developed.

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He's composing for a new "Action Survival Horror" game they're developing with the director from Resident Evil. I'm glad he basically killed Silent Hill so we could have another generic "KILL ALL TEH ZOMBIES" survival horror game.

I hope it includes lots'a suspense and shock value.

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Well at least it will have a killer soundtrack, eh

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That too.

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Silent Hill died the moment Team Silent outsourced the development to a studio that had no clue what the series was about or how to go about making a decent Silent Hill game. It must have been very frustrating for Akira to see his beloved series be turned into a generic zombie shooter.

Sorry, just a bitter point for me, I loved the unique feel of Silent Hill, and even The Room was pretty good despite its flaws, but then it turned into any other zombie shooter with the others. :<

I wish Yamaoka well, and I hope BEMANI can continue to contract his services.

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The Room, Origins, and Homecoming all sucked. But Shattered Memories is very good.

This is his work in NMH2...



I actually enjoyed Silent Hill Homecoming, even if the battle system was a little meh. I couldn't get myself together to finish The Room. Loved 1-3 though.

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Yeah I'm gonna have to re-iterate that to anyone that (understandably) gave up after homecoming, Shattered Memories is trippy and awesome.

also his work in NMH is still looking to be tip top. not disappointed. sounds better than quite a bit of his stuff in IIDX i think at least.

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