Meet Yuzo Koshiro: your favourite game’s soundtrack wouldn’t exist without him

How the Streets of Rage and Etrian Odyssey composer was inspired by disco, city pop, and slyly recording music from arcade cabinets

From the urban warzones of Shinobi and Streets of Rage to the high fantasy realms of Ys and Etrian Odyssey, Japanese composer Yuzo Koshiro has seen (and heard) it all. His engineering wizardry helped establish video game music as a force to be reckoned with, alongside its cinematic and televisual siblings. His foresight allowed him to retain the rights to his own music, in an industry that's often keen on prising the art from the artist. In so many ways, and across so many disciplines, Koshiro has always been ahead of his time.

And it all began with him secretly recording the music from his favourite games in arcades. When I was a teenager, spending time at amusement arcades, game developers would only release a few video game titles in a year," he explains. However, each game had its own distinct electronic sound that set them apart, creating an immersive atmosphere in the arcade halls." Koshiro - and many other Japanese game music enthusiasts of the era, he says - would go to a game centre with a tape recorder in hand, so he could thumb the cassette into a player at home and listen to the music whenever he wanted.