Yuzo Koshiro is a
musician who has composed the soundtracks for many video games over the last fifteen-or-so years. He first came to the attention of international audiences for his work with
Sega on the game
Revenge of Shinobi, as well as the
Streets of Rage series. (Koshiro is credited on the title screens of these games.)* Prior to this he worked on games for Japanese home computers (including
Sorcerian for
Falcom). He has also worked with
Enix on the two
Actraiser games for the
SNES.
In the early 1990's, Yuzo Koshiro (along with his sister, the artist Ayano Koshiro) started an independent development company called Ancient to create new games and soundtracks for other people's games. Ancient's best known work (all scored by Koshiro) includes The Story of Thor and its sequel (known in the U.S. as Beyond Oasis and The Legend of Oasis), as well as Streets of Rage 2 and the Game Gear version of Sonic The Hedgehog. More recently, Yuzo Koshiro has worked on the soundtrack of Shenmue.
Koshiro has experimented with different musical styles for different projects, the Streets of Rage games featuring techno and house influenced dance music, Revenge of Shinobi and Shenmue having more traditional Japanese music, and the Thor games having a more 'epic' classical style. Several CDs of his music have been released over the last few years, but may be difficult to find.
Rumours persist that a fourth Streets of Rage game is being planned, and Koshiro has mentioned in interviews that he would be keen to work on such a game, having pitched the idea unsuccessfully to Sega of America in the past.
*His mastery of the
Sega Mega Drive's (notoriously limited)
Yamaha sound chip was said to have been acheived by wiring the chip up to his synthesizers and experimenting with it to find 'tricks' to simulate different instruments.