17 Facts About Yuzo Koshiro

Yuzo Koshiro is a Japanese composer and sound programmer.

Yuzo Koshiro 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.

Yuzo Koshiro 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.

Yuzo Koshiro 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.

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

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

Yuzo Koshiro wrote the opening song in Romancia that same year.

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

Yuzo Koshiro attempted to reproduce the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 beats and Roland TB-303 synths using FM synthesis.

Yuzo Koshiro composed the soundtrack to Streets of Rage 3, along with colleague Kawashima who contributed in a larger capacity than in 2.

Yuzo Koshiro was one of the first composers credited under his real name in a time when several other Japanese developers were credited under pen names.

Also in 1994, Yuzo Koshiro co-composed the soundtrack with Kawashima for the Mega-CD version of Eye of the Beholder, a dungeon crawl role-playing video game ported over from the original by Japanese developer Opera House and published by Sega.

Yuzo Koshiro composed the soundtrack for Sega's Shenmue alongside Takenobu Mitsuyoshi and various others, with Koshiro contributing fifteen original compositions to the soundtrack.

Yuzo Koshiro composed the main theme of the French TV channel Nolife, which launched in 2007.

In 2018, Yuzo Koshiro contributed one song to Nobuhiko Okamoto's album Braverthday.

Yuzo Koshiro was brought back to compose for Streets of Rage 4 in 2020, along with Kawashima and several others.

Yuzo Koshiro created the opening and ending jingles for the YouTube channel Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games.