Why did Chrono Trigger's composer work himself sick?

Yasunori Mitsuda was not a composer at Square. He was a sound programmer, unhappy with his pay, and he told the company he would leave if he could not write music. Hironobu Sakaguchi handed him Chrono Trigger, with a remark Mitsuda has repeated since: maybe your salary will go up. It was his first major score, and he attacked it like a man proving a case. He drew on a personal stockpile of pieces written over the previous two years, wrote each tune to run about two minutes before looping, unusually long for the era, and slept in his studio several nights. The ending theme, 'To Far Away Times', came to him in a dream.

Then the production hit him twice. A hard drive crash destroyed around forty tracks in progress. And the pace put him in medical trouble: Mitsuda developed stomach ulcers and could not finish. Nobuo Uematsu, the veteran Final Fantasy composer, joined the project, composed ten pieces, and completed the score; one further track came from Noriko Matsueda. Mitsuda's name still covers the bulk of one of the most praised soundtracks ever made: three discs' worth at release, an amount of music the industry called unprecedented.

He returned before launch to watch the finished ending with the staff, and cried at what his music had become. Chrono Trigger made him: he has called it the landmark that matured his talent. The illness is part of the record, not a legend, and the story needs no embellishment. The score sounds the way it does because a young man decided it was worth everything he had, and then, briefly, it cost him exactly that.