Very OK Vinyl & Disc Union have just-announced CD/vinyl soundtracks for the doujin X68000 horny brick-breaker Metal Orange EX and the PC-FX fixed-screen action game Chip-Chan Kick, and I'm sure some people might be scratching their heads at why these particular soundtracks would be surfacing in 2024 (and via a western label at that), so allow me to fill in the blanks:
edit: sigh
The music from these games and many, many more were being illegally monetised and policed by an oddball who went by Yusup Dalmaz, the representative of a company called MetroVG that supposedly managed a catalogue of music written by them and/or their father, who they claim lived in Japan in the '90s and was secretly writing music for obscure Japanese PC games under a pseudonym, and who'd secured the perpetual global publishing rights for European PC ports of these games that never released.
This guy had been known to VGM communities for a while, as he was (and remains, via endless dummy accounts) committed to both policing uploads of tunes he claimed to write/own, and also for vandalizing wikis and websites about the source of a lot of music. Dude was no criminal mastermind, preying exclusively on obscure tunes or whatever: he stole anything and everything, for the sake of streams with single-digit plays, and the vast majority of "his" music, which he'd routinely claim was from some Russian game you'd never heard of, or an arranged version of an unused track from an unreleased EU port of a game that doesn't exist, were tracks taken straight from, like, Bubble Bobble, and Outrun, with an echo filter on 'em.
Dalmaz's allegations have always been transparent bullshit that took no effort to dismantle, but what makes dude different from the average plagiarist is that they took their claims directly to several of the co-composers of Metal Orange EX and Chip-Chan Kick—yes, dude had the audacity to try and tell the people who wrote the music that it was actually written by some random Bulgarian guy, and that the reasons he couldn't credibly respond to any of their queries about the making of the game, or why he couldn't parse any of the reams of evidence they produced to prove he was completely full of shit, was because they were making things up.
(He eventually resorted to scapegoating sock-puppet accounts and all sorts of insane nonsense that I cannot dredge up right now, either because he deleted it or because I'm barred from viewing most of it; I'd link you to the youtube video produced by Patbytes but Dalmaz almost killed their channel with fraudulent DMCA claims, so you'll have to make do with an archive.org link.)
Dude's clearly unwell, and the global community's resigned to the idea that they're going to have to keep swatting them for the indefinite future, but the drama surrounding these two games did kickstart a broader discussion about the commercialisation of VGM among Japanese VGM scene members and historians... essentially, people came to realise that no matter their personal position on commercialising their old work or whether there was any commercial demand for them to do so, they needed to be more vigilant about controlling their work, because if they don't, there are plenty of vultures all around the world who'll do it for them and global copyright laws won't necessarily be on their side, and the next vulture's probably not going to be as incompetent as this one.
Will these releases serve as leaders of a new vanguard that'll enshrine the legacy of veteran VGM workers? Probably not, but I'm glad that these composers' interactions with this pest did ultimately lead to something positive. Do actually listen to 'em if you decide to pick 'em up, too: Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata contributed to both soundtracks, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who know them for their Square-era work who've never delved this deep into their early years.
