Mega Anser Mystery

[Enja Hamman]

It sounds like it'll be someone no one knows how to contact, right? And probably someone who might be assigned to work on something like a banking cartridge. The top 3 I guess that come to my mind are:
Haruyo "LOTTY" Oguro (earliest work is 16t in 1991, so check that out for similarities to confirm if it's her, it was my first thought)
XOR (Spotlight in just 1990 and 1991, only known work of theirs with entirely original music is MegaMind which is very complex)
PSYCHEDELIC CHUNG (works where all the music would have been theirs are Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe and Ikasuze! Koi no Doki Doki Penguin Land MD, they seem to prefer fast-paced music)
They're probably very bad guesses on my part, I'm OK with identifying consistent specific sounds, but with recurring composition I'm very bad. EDIT 2: Other guesses that popped into my head as obscure enough, but I dunno if there's any similar sound, are Sachio Ogawa, Keisuke Tsukahara, Chikako "TARNYA" Kamatani, Masafumi Ogata, maybe even Tokuhiko Uwabo? Basically just some people of the time you wouldn't be able to contact.
I do feel as if I've heard some music near-identical to that Mega Answer BGM before, but it could just be that I've heard so much today that I'm feeling like I've heard it all my life, haha. (EDIT 1: Apparently it was played on an episode of Pick N' Mix over on RadioSEGA, maybe I heard it then)
Maybe spotting the sound effects could help? Sometimes creators reuse sound effects across different games.

EDIT 3:
A big tell that XOR was involved with Mega Anser that my friend electricboogaloo pointed out is that there's a track from it that's reused from Alex Kidd in Shinobi World. Or was reused in Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, both products released the same year. Now my question is if there might be just the one sound creator or multiple.
Mega Anser - 02
Alex Kidd in Shinobi World - ROUND 4

[skully111]

Originally Posted by Nicolaas Hamman

It sounds like it'll be someone no one knows how to contact, right? And probably someone who might be assigned to work on something like a banking cartridge. The top 3 I guess that come to my mind are:
Haruyo "LOTTY" Oguro (earliest work is 16t in 1991, so check that out for similarities to confirm if it's her, it was my first thought)
XOR (Spotlight in just 1990 and 1991, only known work of theirs with entirely original music is MegaMind which is very complex)
PSYCHEDELIC CHUNG (works where all the music would have been theirs are Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe and Ikasuze! Koi no Doki Doki Penguin Land MD, they seem to prefer fast-paced music)
They're probably very bad guesses on my part, I'm OK with identifying consistent specific sounds, but with recurring composition I'm very bad. EDIT 2: Other guesses that popped into my head as obscure enough, but I dunno if there's any similar sound, are Sachio Ogawa, Keisuke Tsukahara, Chikako "TARNYA" Kamatani, Masafumi Ogata, maybe even Tokuhiko Uwabo? Basically just some people of the time you wouldn't be able to contact.
I do feel as if I've heard some music near-identical to that Mega Answer BGM before, but it could just be that I've heard so much today that I'm feeling like I've heard it all my life, haha. (EDIT 1: Apparently it was played on an episode of Pick N' Mix over on RadioSEGA, maybe I heard it then)
Maybe spotting the sound effects could help? Sometimes creators reuse sound effects across different games.

EDIT 3:
A big tell that XOR was involved with Mega Anser that my friend electricboogaloo pointed out is that there's a track from it that's reused from Alex Kidd in Shinobi World. Or was reused in Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, both products released the same year. Now my question is if there might be just the one sound creator or multiple.
Mega Anser - 02
Alex Kidd in Shinobi World - ROUND 4

Thank you, this was really helpful. Super unfortunate that composers used sudonyms back then. Why was that?

[zierts]

Basically, it was companies positioning themselves in a relatively young industry and avoiding talent drains. Disgruntled employees would leave a video game developer to join its competitors or found their own company, or head hunters from other companies would seek competitors' staff out and convince them to switch employers. There were a few cases were this happened on a large scale, such as Irem -> Capcom, Nihon Falcom -> Quintet, Capcom <-> SNK, Capcom -> Square, Square -> Mistwalker if I'm not mistaken. There may be more prominent examples, these are only off the top of my head.

Now, how to avoid a rival company stealing your employees? Keep your staff members' names secret by forcing them to use pseudonyms in credits or by removing credits altogether. Some rival company would go: "Hey, that music in Zelda is great, let's get that guy/gal to join our company!" Then they'd beat the game and only find the pseudonym KONCHAN instead of Koji Kondo. No lead as to the name meant no means of contacting that person and making them an offer. Changing a single developer's pseudonym between games had the added benefit of making it even harder to track down the person responsible for a specific aspect of a game. If you can find a pseudonym in only one game, it's much harder to tell whether the person does consistently good work in their area.

This reason is often assumed to be just a rumor but I think some NES/SNES era have confirmed this to be the case. I'm not sure as to the source, but I think I've seen the Super Castlevania IV director say this in a RetroGamer magazine making-of, unless I'm mixing something up.