In 1993, Naofumi Hataya and Masafumi Ogata turned in their first demo for Sonic the Hedgehog CD. Designer Naoto Ohshima listened and said no. He wanted something bolder. Something experimental. What they had given him was not enough.
Hataya had joined Sega in 1990, three years earlier, at the age of twenty-three. He was a graduate of Rikkyo University, where he had played in a band. But he had not intended to become a musician. He wanted to improve his skills in something music-related, so he applied to a company that made sound. That was all. He did not set out to compose soundtracks that people would remember thirty years later. He set out to get better at something he was not very good at yet.
His first project was sound effects for Super Monaco GP on the Mega Drive. Then came the 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, where he was credited as 'Nao Chan.' Then Golden Axe II. These were functional works. They served the games they were in. No one complained. No one called them bold.
Sonic CD was different. The Sega CD console could store and play CD-quality audio — something cartridges could not do. Sega had allocated a large audio budget specifically to show what the new hardware could do. Hataya and Ogata had a chance to make something that would be heard clearly, in full fidelity, by everyone who played the game. So they had to decide what that sound should be.
After Ohshima rejected the first demo, they looked around at what was happening in Japan at the time. House music and techno were sweeping through clubs. C+C Music Factory. Frankie Knuckles. The KLF. Fast, bright, synthetic, unapologetically electronic. They drew on that. The soundtrack they produced felt like a club — not a concert hall, not a traditional video game score. Tracks like 'Palmtree Panic,' 'Stardust Speedway,' and 'Metallic Madness' became iconic within the Sonic series and helped establish a new direction for game music in the 1990s.
Three years later, in 1996, Hataya co-composed the soundtrack for NiGHTS into Dreams alongside Tomoko Sasaki. The music shifted away from the high-energy sound of Sonic CD toward something more atmospheric and dreamlike. The game was about flight and surrealism, and the music had to carry that feeling. The partnership with Sasaki became a recurring one. They worked together again on the Christmas variant of the game. Their work on NiGHTS is remembered not for being bold, but for being immersive — for making the player believe they were somewhere else.
In 1998 came Burning Rangers, a Saturn game about firefighters in a futuristic city. In a developer interview, Hataya explained his approach: the music needed to convey the immediacy of being surrounded by fire while also highlighting the human drama. Because much of the emotional narrative was carried through voice recordings, he chose not to make the music overly insistent. Instead, he created an atmospheric layer that supported the tension without overwhelming it. 'Our mission as composers is to try and assist and enhance the game however we can,' he said. 'Making the experience as immersive as possible is our job.'
Hataya continued working with Sega into the 2000s, contributing to titles such as Sonic Heroes in 2003 alongside Jun Senoue. He is currently affiliated with Wave Master Inc., Sega's dedicated audio production company. Over thirty years after joining Sega to improve his skills in something he was not very good at, he remains active in the industry.
His career is a reminder that the role of a composer in games is not to take the spotlight, but to build the world from behind. The sound of fire. The feeling of speed. The texture of a dream. These are the tools a composer uses to make a player believe they are somewhere else — somewhere the screen alone cannot take them.
The work you are doing now — did you choose it because you wanted it, or because you wanted to get better at something you were not very good at yet? And if it has become your life anyway, what does that mean about choosing?