Yuzo Koshiro
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Yuzo Koshiro was born on December 12, 1967 in Hino, Tokyo, Japan. At the age of three, Koshiro began to learn the piano. While still very young he received lessons from famed film composer Joe Hisaishi. His first video game composition was in 1986 when he began working for Nihon Falcom. After composing several soundtracks over the course of two years, Koshiro left Nihon Falcom to become a freelance composer. He composed several soundtracks for Sega and in 1990 he and his family founded Ancient Corp., a video game development company.
Koshiro has also composed jingles for television, arranged his music for orchestral performance, and DJed his music.
Some of Koshiro's favorite game soundtracks include Gradius, Space Harrier, and Tower of Druaga, which convinced him to try composing music for video games. He has a fondness for older 8 and 16 bit audio chips and thinks that the orchestral music of today isn't quite up to the standards of the earlier soundtracks. Of his own work, Koshiro likes Wangan Midnight, Streets of Rage 2, and ActRaiser. For more conventional music, Koshiro enjoys classical, techno, and trance.
While many of the early composers of video game music either wrote music, arranged music for audio chips, or programmed audio chips for sound, Koshiro did all of these things with his soundtracks and even created his own programming languages (a custom Music Macro Language and Music Love) for audio composition.
Contents
Music Development
MSX/NES/PC-88
Koshiro composed music using Music Macro Language.
GEN
Koshiro composed music using his own MUCOM88 tool for NEC PC-88 and converted his own music files to modified versions of SMPS by M.N.M. Software and Ancient.
On Earthion, he used MDSDRV.
GG
On Sonic the Hedgehog and GG Shinobi, Koshiro composed music using Music Macro Language and converted music files to his own sound driver.
Later, he used M.N.M. Software's sound driver by Mikito Ichikawa.
SNES
Koshiro used his own version of Nintendo's Kankichi-kun.
GBA
On Car Battler Joe, Koshiro used Nintendo's MP2K sound driver.
NDS
Koshiro used Intelligent Systems' Nitro Composer sound driver.
Gameography
Picture Gallery
Unknown source.
Links
- ancient.co.jp - Official.
- facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004268557670 - Facebook (Note: Koshiro's Facebook may only be for friends he knows in real life).
- mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,483416 - MobyGames.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuzo_Koshiro - Wikipedia.
