Yuzo Koshiro
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.[1][2][3] Koshiro and his sister Ayano founded the game development company Ancient in 1990, of which he remains the president.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 then produced the soundtrack to Dragon Slayer IV / Legacy of the Wizard (1987), which was influenced by the sounds of early Konami games.[1] 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[1][18] and "progressive, catchy, techno-style compositions"[7] that fused electronic dance music with traditional Japanese music.[12] 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.[1] His soundtracks for the Streets of Rage series (known as Bare Knuckle in Japan) from 1991 to 1994 were composed using then outdated PC-8801 hardware alongside his own original audio programming language.[21] The soundtrack for Streets of Rage 2 in particular is considered "revolutionary" and ahead of its time,[8][9] for its "amazing blend of swaggering house synths, dirty" electro-funk and "trancey electronic textures that would feel as comfortable in a nightclub as a video game."[23] Koshiro composed the soundtrack to Streets of Rage 3 (1994), along with colleague Kawashima who contributed in a larger capacity than in 2.He created a new composition method called the "Automated Composing System" to produce "fast-beat techno like jungle.This method was very rare at the time, but has since become popular among techno and trance music producers to get "unexpected and odd sounds.[25] Also in 1994, 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.