In Panama, in the summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old boy from Japan sat in front of a television and watched MTV. Guns N' Roses. Metallica. The raw, electric sound of American rock in the mid-eighties, delivered through a cable signal into a foreign city. He had started playing piano at three years old back in Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, but this was something else — something louder, something that did not ask permission. He picked up an electric guitar and began teaching himself to play. No teacher. No conservatory. Every riff he learned, he learned by ear.
Jun Senoue was born on August 2, 1970. His family moved to Panama when he was twelve. He does not appear to have planned a career in music at that age. When he returned to Japan and enrolled at Aoyama Gakuin University, he studied economics. But the guitar stayed in his hands. By seventeen, he had made his first original band recording. By the time he graduated in 1993, he had demo tapes.
He sent those tapes to Namco and Sega. Sega hired him. His first project was Dark Wizard, a tactical RPG for the Sega CD, where he arranged a medley of the game's music for the staff roll. He also wrote pieces and jingles for Sonic the Hedgehog 3. These were competent jobs — the work of a new hire learning the ropes. Through the mid-1990s he contributed to the Worldwide Soccer series. The work was steady. It was not yet the sound he had heard on MTV.
In 1998, he was selected to be the lead composer and sound director of Sonic Adventure. This was Sonic's first full 3D game, the franchise's transition from the Sega Genesis to the Dreamcast, and Sega needed a new sound to match the new dimension. Senoue made a choice: he would bring rock into Sonic. Not the chiptune melodies that had defined the earlier games, but guitars — distorted, driving, the sound he had taught himself in Panama. For the game's main theme, 'Open Your Heart,' he contacted an American vocalist named Johnny Gioeli. The song was rock. The game was a success. Sonic Adventure sold over two million copies. Senoue's name became known worldwide. He was promoted to series sound director.
In 2000, he and Gioeli recorded the soundtrack for NASCAR Arcade under the name Sons of Angels. The album, Thrill of the Feel, was released in Japan. But there was a problem: a Norwegian band called Sons of Angels had reformed, and the name was taken. When Senoue and Gioeli were asked to write the main theme for Sonic Adventure 2 in 2001, they needed a new name. They called themselves Crush 40. The song was 'Live & Learn.' It became one of the most recognized tracks in the Sonic franchise.
Crush 40 has since recorded theme songs for Sonic Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog, and Sonic Generations. The band performs live. They tour. They have released albums. Jun Senoue now has two jobs: he is a sound director for Sega, composing music that is 'linked to scenes and the experience,' as he once said in an interview. And he is the lead guitarist of Crush 40, a band that plays 'simply the music we feel we need to play.'
In his own words, when he composes for a game, he prefers to play the level first — to feel the tempo, to understand how easy or difficult the stage is, to gather information from the experience. But sometimes, he says, all he has is concept art, a single screenshot, or a simple illustration. It is very tough, he admits. But sometimes, the constraint is the inspiration.
The boy who learned guitar from MTV in Panama at fifteen is now in his fifties. He still plays. He still writes music for Sonic games. He still performs with Crush 40. Somewhere in that span — between the economics degree he earned and the rock music he taught himself, between the job that asks him to serve a scene and the band that asks him only to play — is a question he has lived with for thirty years: which sound is his own, and does it matter if both are true?