Yoko Shimomura on BAFTA Games Awards fellowship honour: ‘I’m delighted’

At this year’s BAFTA Games Awards, legendary Japanese video game composer and pianist Yoko Shimomura was awarded a fellowship for her incredible contribution to the industry; a fellowship is the highest honour that BAFTA can bestow.

If you don’t know Shimomura-san by name, you’ll most certainly know her music.

Across her illustrious career, Shimomura-san has worked on some unforgettable soundtracks, providing original scores for the Kingdom Hearts series, Final Fantasy XV, the Mario & Luigi series, Xenoblade Chronicles, Streets of Rage, the Mana series, Super Mario RPG, Live A Live, Radiant Historia, Parasite Eve, Breather of Fire, and Street Fighter II.

And that’s really just the icing on top of the cake, as the composer’s catalogue extends far beyond this.

Shimomura-san most recently worked on Reynatis and Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, and is currently in the midst of scoring the upcoming Kingdom Hearts IV.

You can take a look at Kingdom Hearts IV in action below.

At last week’s BAFTA Games Awards, I had the honour of catching up with Shimomura-san just moments after she stepped off stage from delivering her fellowship acceptance speech - a highlight of the evening. Of course, the composer was full of awe and gratitude; I asked how one might digest not just being recognised by peers but being acknowledged as an icon of the industry.

“When I first heard the news, and I think this may be a bad thing that a lot of Japanese people do, is I thought, ‘Me? Really? I'm not good enough for this kind of thing’, so I was kind of embarrassed and thinking that there's many more people better than me,” a humble Shimomura-san explained via a translator.

“At the same time, I was obviously very happy too, now it's had a bit more time to settle in. I'm just honestly very, very happy; I'm delighted with this award.”

As for whether Shimomura-san can pinpoint a specific project that marked a real change in her career, that proved a little difficult to pin down: “I should probably say that there are a number of them, not just one.” Understandable. I’m not sure I’d be able to single out a project from a portfolio as incredible as Shimomura-san’s.

As I mentioned, Shimomura-san remains hard at work on the music for the upcoming Kingdom Hearts IV. I was keen to find how she felt being awarded the BAFTA fellowship might change things going forward.

“I'd imagine maybe the way people see me, look at me now, might change a bit, but personally I don't want to change my approach to things,” Shimomura-san told me, again via a translator.

“I don't think I will. I really don't want to let this get to my head,” she continued. “I'm just going to keep doing what I've always done, focusing on each individual track, trying to make it as good as possible, each individual game that I'm working on, so I'm not going to change in that sense. I think I'm just going to keep going forward in the same way I've done up until now.”

Once again, congratulations to Yoko Shimomura for this well-deserved recognition.