Yuzo Koshiro

Summer holidays were once about a genuine and sincere lack of responsibility. Most of them were spent pootling around on my bike through the spicey-scented English countryside. Occasionally I shifted the indoor/outdoor ratio around quite significantly. This involved the ritualistic drawing of the curtains during the day in favour of being able to see the old teak-surrounded telly without any glare from the sun. It also involved one of the finest home video-games consoles ever to grace these shores. The Sega Megadrive.

Two particular games that I still occasionally play (thanks to a nifty emulator) are the ninja slash-fest, Revenge of Shinobi (1990) and the classic, scrolling, thug ‘em up, Streets of Rage (1991). Both are legendary in terms of the how they pushed the gaming envelope, not just for the Mega-drive console itself, but also for the gaming industry at the time. Apart from the gameplay and graphics it was the music that always stood out me, which is a good thing as it’s actually pretty hard to avoid it when you play the same game solidly for six weeks. So enamoured by it, I even (embarrassingly) recorded the soundtracks via a tape recorder held up to the telly speaker and for many years until the advent of youtube, I had no way of recalling the tracks or even finding out who the composers were.

I now know that the chap behind the evocative 8-bit soundtracks was legendary Japanese composer, Yuzo Koshiro. Yuzo’s career has spanned a vast plethora of games on many platforms; Zork, Act Raiser, Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega Master System), Crackdown, Super Adventure Island, Batman Returns, Fusion Frenzy 2, New Super Mario Bro’s, Protect me Knight, Dragon Ball Online and several other unpronounceable Japanese games that I would never understand. What I find so incredible is that Yuzo managed to create masterpieces with a very limited sound chip. The Zilog z80 sound chip worked on two programmable FM synthesiser chips giving it a very limited tonal range and characteristic hollow, metallic sound. Somehow Yuzo stretched the output of this to build arrangements that still haunt me to this day. In particular, the Streets of Rage soundtrack was very much inline with the emergence of house and techno in the mainstream back in the early 90′s and I remember it sounded pretty fresh for console music.

Yuzo runs his own company called Ancient Corp, and you can read a good interview with him on VideoGamesDaily. I’ve also heard he has been doing live versions of the music from classics like Revenge of Shinobi with various orchestras around Europe, which sounds very interesting indeed.

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