Yuzo Koshiro

Yuzo Koshiro (古代 祐三) is a Japanese composer and sound programmer.

He is often regarded as one of the most influential innovators in chiptune and video game music, producing music in a number of genres including rock, jazz, symphonic, and various electronic genres such as house, electro, techno, trance, and hip hop.

Koshiro was born in Tokyo on December 12, 1967.

His mother, Tomo Koshiro, was a pianist.

She taught him how to play the piano at the age of three, and by the age of five, he had a strong command of it.

In 1975, he began taking music lessons from Joe Hisaishi and studied with him for three years.

Everything Koshiro has learned after that has since been self-taught.

He has been cited as creating some of the most memorable game music of the 1980s and 1990s contributing for games such as Nihon Falcom's Dragon Slayer and Ys series, as well as Sega's The Revenge of Shinobi and Streets of Rage series.

The soundtracks for the latter have been cited by some to be ahead of their time.

While he was still in high school during the early 1980s, Koshiro began composing music on the NEC PC-8801 as a hobby, including mockups of early arcade game music from Namco, Konami, and Sega.

The sequencing skills and experience he gained from this would later be utilized in his early video game projects.

The video games that influenced him most were The Tower of Druaga (1984), Space Harrier (1985), and Gradius (1985).

The video game music soundtracks to these games inspired him to become a video game composer.

Koshiro's first composing job was with Nihon Falcom in 1986 at the age of 18.

Falcom used compositions from the PC-8801 demo tape he had sent them in their Dragon Slayer action role-playing game Xanadu Scenario II, for its opening theme and several dungeon levels.

He also wrote the opening song in Romancia that same year.

His compositions for these early games were influenced by arcade game music and Japanese bands such as The Alfee.

He then produced the soundtrack to Dragon Slayer IV / Legacy of the Wizard (1987), which was influenced by the sounds of early Konami games.

His most well-known Falcom works are his soundtracks for Sorcerian (1987) and the early Ys games, Ys I (1987) and Ys II (1988).

These early music productions mainly featured rock and fusion music.

The TurboGrafx-CD versions of the first three Ys games (from 1989 to 1991) are notable for their very early use of Red Book audio in video games.

Music from the Ys games were also employed in the Ys anime.

All of these early soundtracks were produced using the FM synthesis sound chip of the PC-8801.

Despite later advances in audio technology, Koshiro would continue to use older PC-8801 hardware to produce many of his later video game soundtracks, including the Streets of Rage and Etrian Odyssey soundtracks.

His soundtracks for early Nihon Falcom games, such as the Dragon Slayer and Ys series, are widely regarded as some of the most influential role-playing video game scores.

Following his separation with Falcom, Koshiro became a freelancer, composing music for many other companies.

His early freelance projects included the Sharp X68000 port of Bosconian, Bothtec's action role-playing game The Scheme (1988) for the PC-8801, and Enix's visual novel adventure game Misty Blue for the PC-9801 in 1990.

The latter two soundtracks featured early Eurobeat music.

His most notable freelance work was for Sega: his first freelance work for the company was the soundtrack to The Revenge of Shinobi (1989), for which he produced house and "progressive, catchy, techno-style compositions" that fused electronic dance music with traditional Japanese music.

Koshiro and his sister Ayano founded the game development company Ancient in 1990, of which he remains the president.

His soundtrack for ActRaiser (1990), on the other hand, was mainly classical and orchestral.

While working on ActRaiser, in order to get around the SNES's 64 KB memory limitation which limited the number of instruments that can be used and prevented the reloading of samples, Koshiro developed a sample loading system that worked with the ROM cartridge memory, swapping samples from the ROM data on the fly.

This allowed him to "load parts of the music gradually as needed, and also change it quickly between stages or parts of a stage" which the "original system couldn't do it with its restrictions."

In 1990, Koshiro helped found Ancient Corp..

The company was co-founded by his mother, Tomo Koshiro, while his sister Ayano Koshiro works at the company as an art/character/graphic designer and was also the art designer for the ActRaiser games.

His sister Ayano has designed characters and graphics for several games Koshiro has worked on, including the Streets of Rage (Bare Knuckle in Japan) series, Ys, and ActRaiser.

While working with Ancient, he composed the soundtrack for the 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog in 1991.

He adapted several pieces of music from the original 16-bit version, while the rest of the soundtrack consisted of his own original music.

In a 1992 interview, Koshiro said that his favorite music genres are new wave, dance music, technopop, classical, and hard rock, and that his favorite Western bands are Van Halen and Soul II Soul.

A similar system was used by other companies for later SNES games such as Squaresoft's Seiken Densetsu 3 (1995) and Namco Tales Studio's Tales of Phantasia (1995).