In 1990, Masato Nakamura was composing music for a game that did not move yet. He worked from a storyboard — still pictures. He has said he was already about thirty years old by then, a bassist who had debuted with a band. Nobody had told him the hedgehog on those pages would be heard by the whole world.
The band was Dreams Come True. Nakamura formed it in 1988 with the vocalist Miwa Yoshida and the keyboard player Takahiro Nishikawa. Today it is described as a band that has sold over fifty million CDs. In 1990 it was not yet that. Nakamura, looking back in a 2021 interview with Gizmodo Japan, said he had not expected the band to sell quickly, so he was making all kinds of music 'like a part-time job.' He also said that inside their label, Epic, Dreams Come True was 'not the cool group.'
The offer came sideways. According to Nakamura, the producer at the band's first agency was friendly with a senior person at Sega, and from that person he heard that Sega was going to make a game to rival Mario. 'It started at the level of: want to try it? OK,' he said, laughing.
He knew what he wanted it to be. 'Personally, I wanted to make it a soundtrack,' he said. The machine would give him very little to do it with. In his words, it was an era of 'five or six' simultaneous voices — other accounts say four, so sources differ on the exact number. His attitude was practical: if it is six voices, then 'ah, six, understood.'
He did not program the music himself. He handed Sega MIDI data and track sheets, and Sega's team rebuilt the sound on the console. The sheets carried instructions. 'Track one is the melody, and for the sound source, please use this patch name on the Yamaha SY77' — that kind of thing, he said. The part that surprised him was that, by the Mega Drive's first Sonic, he could use sampled sounds at all. And when a song had nine tracks but the machine could not play nine at once, he said, you shifted the timing by a hair so that it sounded simultaneous.
Sonic the Hedgehog came out in 1991. For Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in 1992 he wrote another full soundtrack, and a Dreams Come True song, 'Sweet Sweet Sweet,' was used for its ending. Then he went back to the band. He describes how he works without any romance: 'I'm a craftsman who can't make anything unless I sit in a chair in the studio and face the screen.'
In September 2021, thirty years after the first game, Dreams Come True released a new song built on the Green Hill Zone melody. Miwa Yoshida wrote its words, and Nakamura wrote the music. In the Gizmodo Japan interview that year, he called the whole chain of events 'a miracle, like a planetary alignment, a grand cross.' Then he added, still joking, that when a real grand cross happened in 1999, nothing happened.
The melody has outlasted the storyboard, the five voices, the Yamaha patches, and the console. It began as something done with a part-time-job feeling, for a game that did not yet move. What are you doing right now with that same feeling — and what would you make of it if you decided it was a soundtrack?