PaRappa is a dog. Paper thin — literally. His name in Japanese is a pun on the word for flat. He wears a beanie. He is trying to impress a girl whose head is a flower. His karate instructor is an anthropomorphic onion in a gi.
None of this is an accident and none of it is stupid.
PaRappa the Rapper was released in Japan on December 6, 1996. On the exact same day, Crash Bandicoot came out. One of those games became a mascot. The other became the foundation of an entire genre of music that generates billions of dollars annually and that most people have forgotten started with a paper thin dog on a PlayStation.
Masaya Matsuura made PaRappa. He was a musician first — not a game developer. He came at the problem from the other direction. Most games that involved music at the time used music as decoration. Background. Atmosphere. Matsuura thought music should be the game. The thing you interact with, the thing that responds to you, the thing you participate in rather than consume.
That idea — which seems obvious now — was so foreign to Sony’s development culture in 1996 that the people making it weren’t sure what category to put it in. Matsuura himself thought it would sell nothing. He felt that way for six months after release.
He was wrong. PaRappa sold roughly three million copies across its various ports. More importantly it convinced the industry that music games were a real genre. Shuhei Yoshida, who would eventually run Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide, said directly that without PaRappa the entire category of music games might not have survived. Guitar Hero. Rock Band. Dance Dance Revolution. Rhythm Heaven. Beat Saber. All of them exist in a direct line from a paper thin dog learning karate from an onion so he could impress a girl with a flower for a face.
The visual design was Rodney Greenblat’s — an American artist whose work drew from Japanese pop culture and Western animation simultaneously. The characters were intentionally flat to match the pun in PaRappa’s name. Two dimensional in a medium that was racing toward three dimensions as fast as it could. Every other PlayStation game in 1996 was trying to add polygons. PaRappa was removing them on purpose.
That contrarianism is the whole point. The game understood something about hip hop that a lot of hip hop games have missed — that the culture was never really about being hard. PaRappa raps about cooking. About getting a driver’s license. About needing to use a bathroom urgently. The scenarios are absurd and the music is genuinely good. Chop Chop Master Onion’s theme song is an earworm that has been living rent free in the heads of everyone who played this game for nearly thirty years.
“I gotta believe” is PaRappa’s catchphrase. It’s also the game’s mechanic — when you’re failing, when the music falls apart, when the rhythm won’t connect, you have to believe it back into existence. That is a better description of what it feels like to actually make music than most music theory textbooks manage.
Guitar Hero sold the fantasy of being a rock star. PaRappa sold something smaller and more honest — the experience of trying to get the timing right and occasionally, briefly, getting it exactly right and feeling the song lock in around you.
That’s the whole thing. That’s what music is.
A paper thin dog in a beanie figured it out in 1996 and the rest of the industry spent the next thirty years catching up.
ALL CAPS. ALWAYS.
— Sato