Kenji Yamamoto (山本 健誌, Yamamoto Kenji, born April 25, 1964) is a Japanese video game musician working for Nintendo, notable for composing music in many titles of the Metroid series, mainly Super Metroid and the Metroid Prime trilogy. Yamamoto also plays a role as a music director at Nintendo, overseeing audio for several of their games. He frequently collaborates with fellow composers Minako Hamano and Masaru Tajima.
Yamamoto's music utilizes heavy drums, piano, voiced chants, clangs of pipes, and electric guitar.[1] In development of Super Metroid, Yamamoto came up with some of the game's themes by humming them to himself while riding his motorcycle home from work.[2][3][4]
He was asked to compose the music for Metroid Prime to reinforce the series' continuity.[4] Developers from Retro Studios noted how the process of fitting all the sound effects for a world in Metroid Prime into 6 MB of space was crucial in producing a quality aural experience, as each sound had to be of very high quality. Metroid Prime 3: Corruption took advantage of the increase in the amount of RAM that took place when the series switched from the GameCube to the Wii; this allowed for higher quality audio samples to be used and thus a better overall audio quality.[4]
