Science & Tech Quote by Nobuo Uematsu

Nobuo Uematsu is pointing at a lost constraint that quietly shaped an entire emotional vocabulary: when the household PC (or console) was a shared, always-audible object, sound stopped being purely expressive and started being social. You werent just composing for a player; you were composing for a room. Any sonic jump-scare, abrasive burst, or even an overly mournful motif had collateral damage: siblings yelling to turn it down, parents clocking what youre doing, someone needing the phone line. Surprise becomes harder when your audience is both the user and the unintended bystanders.

Theres also a technical wink baked into it. The "family computer era" evokes tinny speakers, limited channels, looping MIDI-like textures, and the tyranny of repetition. When a sound palette is narrow and constantly recycled, novelty evaporates fast. Startle requires contrast; early home audio often sanded down contrast into a polite, compressed sameness that wouldnt blow out cheap hardware or annoy the household.

The subtext is that game sound design once had to be domesticated. Uematsu, coming out of the 8- and 16-bit tradition, built drama through melody, harmony, and timing rather than sheer volume or realism. Hes not romanticizing limitation so much as noting how it forced composers to be sly: to earn surprise through structure, not shock. As gaming moved into headphones, surround sound, and private screens, the medium regained the ability to be rude, intimate, and abrupt. This line memorializes the moment before that freedom, when audio had to behave.