• Born on October 19, 1967 in Hyogo, Japan
• Currently living in: Tokyo, Japan
• Education: University of Music in Osaka
• Entry from Square: 1994 (left in 2003)
• Main creations: Parasite Eve, Legend of Mana, Kingdom Hearts
• Favorite beverage: tea and coffee
• Favorite foods: sushi, fruit, bagels, cheese
• Favorite Music: techno, jazz, fusion
• Favorite Games: Final Fantasy, Dragon Q, puzzle games
• Favorite Movies: Shine
• Equipment: Power Mac G3 & G4, MOTU MIDI Timepiece & 2408 & DP3,YAMAHA02R
• Instruments played: Piano
• Website: Midiplex

Yoko Shimomura was born in Hyogo Prefecture, October 19, 1967. She began learning piano at age 5, and she studied music at the University of Osaka, where she continued to play the piano. After graduating, She postulated in a video game company and she got accepted! Thus, in 1988, much to the surprise for her family and friends, she joined Capcom. She started her career with Capcom, where she contributed her compositions to a number of arcade and NES games.

Her first game was Samurai Sword on the Famicom Disk System in 1988. She then took part in the group of composers, Alph Lyla (sometimes written Alph Lyra) alongside Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, Tetsuya Nishimura and Isao Abe. Together, they created the music for Street Fighter II and Super Street Fighter II.

Her first project for Square is Live A Live, an original RPG for Super Nintendo. Her songs were already very catchy. During the following year she joins Noriko Matsueda for the first SNES Front Mission, an OST with lot of military beats and very dark themes, the same game was later rebuilt successively on WonderSwan Color in 2002 and PlayStation in 2003 (arranged by Hidenori Iwasaki). Her last game on SNES was the Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, in which some themes of famous composers like Koji Kondo, Nobuo Uematsu were implemented  (the Prelude, the boss theme and the Fanfare Final Fantasy IV ).

Having composed two themes in Tobal No. 1 PlayStation in 1996, Shimomura has launched the most difficult project in her career, Parasite Eve. This “cinematic RPG” designed in the United States had many scenes that could give an impression of torment and terror. This was very chalenging for the composerwho finally made a magical set of themes for the game.

It was a lucky turn of events for a fresh college graduate who had landed at Capcom more out of convenience than by any other circumstance. “There were three companies that showed up at my school, and I was looking at all their conditions,” Shimomura says. “Capcom was the one that met my conditions, so that’s where I applied. The other two companies were too strict, and they were also pretty far from my house. Really, I decided on Capcom simply because it was closer.”

Shimomura is in many ways a pioneer. She’s one of the few female developers to have established a name for herself in the games industry, though she modestly downplays this fact. “At Capcom, there were actually a lot of female composers and artists, so I didn’t really feel there were few females in the industry,” she recalls. “During crunch time, people don’t really care if you’re a man or a woman! They just want you to pull your weight. So I never encountered any resistance. On the contrary, people may not acknowledge you as a woman while you’re working, but sometimes they might complain because you don’t act feminine enough,” she laughs.

Perhaps more importantly, Shimomura was one of the first composers to bring a classic sensibility to game music. Throughout the first decade of the console industry, the people writing scores for games were mostly technicians and programmers first; actual musical talent was strictly a secondary consideration. Though developers would occasionally luck into someone who possessed a keen ear along with a technical mind — Konami’s Hidenori Maezawa, for instance — trained composers were a rarity in the days before CD audio. Shimomura, however, was strictly a musician, classically trained.

“I went to a music college in Osaka, and personally I like games, so I wanted to work for a game company“

While she took satisfaction in carving a career for herself in her field of choice, she wasn’t entirely content with the style of music she was expected to create for Capcom. “Street Fighter II was the most popular game I worked on,” she recalls, but she wanted to branch beyond action games.

With her last album that was focused half on her “greatest hits” album, Drammatica: The Very Best of Yoko Shimomura , that includes music from Final Fantasy Versus XIII, Live A Live, Kingdom Hearts, Front Mission, Legend of Mana, and Heroes of Mana, Yoko has  made an outstanding achievement  in video games music field and was described as “the most famous female video game music composer in the world”. In a 2008 interview with Music4Gamesregarding the project, Shimomura commented that with the sheet music generated for the project, she would be interested in pursuing a live performance of Drammatica for fans if the opportunity arose.On March 19, 2009 that wish was realized when it was announced that Arnie Roth would conduct the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra at the concert Sinfonia Drammatica in theStockholm Concert Hall, which would combine music from the album with performances of Chris Hülsbeck‘s Symphonic Shades concert. The concert took place on August 4, 2009.On March 27, 2007 Shimomura released her first non-video game album, Murmur, an album of vocal songs sung by Chata.