On March 18, 1994, a Mega Drive game called Bare Knuckle III went on sale in Japan. In the West it was Streets of Rage 3. About half of its music had been written by Motohiro Kawashima, and he could not tell whether it was any good. Years later he said so plainly: 'I had no idea if what we were doing was good or bad, whether we were going too overboard.'
Kawashima was born in Nagoya. His father was a composer and conductor who admired Gershwin, and the boy grew up listening to orchestras beside him. He first aimed to be a singer, then developed a collapsed lung, in both lungs, as he later put it. He also failed the entrance exam for an art college. On his father's advice to choose a path with something to fall back on, he enrolled in the theory department at Kunitachi College of Music, a school that trains musicologists.
At Kunitachi he studied twentieth-century classical music. He said it is less about listening for simple enjoyment, and more about asking why a sound exists at all. At about twenty-three he found a second education, at a CD rental shop called 33 in Kichijoji, where he borrowed techno and house. He went to the clubs, and he went to see Underground Resistance, the Detroit collective. 'I was more interested in seeing how solid of a sound they could get out of their synthesizers,' he said.
In 1992, in his fourth year, a classmate told him that Yuzo Koshiro was looking for a composer. Koshiro's mother, a piano teacher, passed along a techno demo Kawashima had made, and Koshiro got in touch. Koshiro ran Ancient, a small company that made music and games for Sega, and Kawashima became its first official employee after Koshiro himself. His first jobs were Shinobi II and Batman Returns for the Game Gear. 'It was really difficult because I had to make the music while programming it with an 8-bit computer,' he said, and Koshiro taught him effects techniques for working inside the limits.
Koshiro had already written much of Streets of Rage 2 when he brought Kawashima in. Kawashima contributed three tracks, one of them called 'Expander,' and met Music Macro Language, the text-based language Koshiro used to write the Mega Drive's music. In a 1993 interview he called it 'very difficult to work with,' and also said it 'lends a charm and style to the music that is only found in video games.' He called Koshiro a master of writing that way.
For the third game the two split the work roughly in half. Koshiro later said it began with Kawashima writing in a style that refined the second game, until Koshiro pushed it somewhere wilder and Kawashima followed. The question they set themselves, Kawashima said, was 'to what extent can we incorporate rotterdam techno (“gabber”) into game music.' Koshiro had built an automatic composing program that relied on heavily randomized sequences. Kawashima used it for a track called 'Fuze,' and wrote 'Poet' by hand.
In a 1994 interview he said: 'Seeing what I could create within the limitations of this sound chip was a big theme for SoR3.' He also said: 'There are probably people out there making video game music who are holding back. We didn't hold anything back for SoR3.' The magazine Mean Machines called the soundtrack 'terrible.' In 2018 the writer John Twells of Fact called it the composers' 'crowning achievement.'
Kawashima kept working, on more games, on songs for other artists, on commercials and anime. In 2017, when the third game's soundtrack was reissued, he and Koshiro planned their first live performance of it, and he told an interviewer he had never imagined it would be played live or pressed on vinyl worldwide. In 2020 he returned to the series as one of the guest composers on Streets of Rage 4. He has also released solo albums, Prepared Wave and Acrobatizm.
Some listeners still hear that soundtrack as too much. Kawashima has said he could not tell then, either. What are you making right now that might be too much, and if no one ever told you whether it was good, would you still finish it?