In 1993 Sega told the team making Daytona USA to beat Ridge Racer. Namco's racing game was already in the arcades, and it was the standard everyone in the room was being measured against. Takenobu Mitsuyoshi was working on the sound. By his later account, the team put lyrics to the music, added the roar of V8 engines, and aimed for CD-quality audio.
Before Sega, he had played in a band. He has said he wondered whether that might count as relevant experience for game music, and that he applied hoping to join the company's own band, the SST Band. The job he got was in the sound team. The singing came later, and nobody had planned it.
Daytona USA reached arcades in March 1994. The songs on it include Let's Go Away, King of Speed and Sky High, and the voice on all of them is Mitsuyoshi's. In a 2025 interview he said that when he decided to sing on the game, he saw only one option: to add vocals. He then said something plain about what came next: "it never even crossed my mind to bring in another singer." Time Extension's summary describes his first vocals as placeholders. We have not found him describing them that way himself.
People noticed. He has said that afterward, the people around him gradually began to see him as the guy who sings. The same year, Sega released Virtua Fighter 2, and around its release the company put out a vocal album tied to the game. Yu Suzuki, the producer, asked him to sing a few songs. By Mitsuyoshi's own account that was his first job as a vocalist.
In 1995 came Sega Rally Championship, and a jingle that every player has heard when a run ends: the words Game Over, sung, with a Yeah on the end. He says he added the Yeah because it sounded good. He also says he has kept one rule since Virtua Racing: when a game needs a Game Over sound, he sings the words Game Over as lyrics. It is a small rule about the least welcome moment in a game, and he made it a song.
He also became a voice in Sega's fighting games. Sources credit him as the voice of Kage-Maru in the Virtua Fighter series, a role he has held across many entries. A listener who never saw a credit would hear the same man who shouted at the start of the racing game.
In time his work moved away from the microphone. On Shenmue for the Dreamcast he was sound director, instructing the staff on the music and working with Yu Suzuki. He has described that job as more directorial than his other projects. In 2003 he released an album of his own, From Loud 2 Low, and in 2007 and 2008 he sang with the Sega Sound Team at the EXTRA Hyper Game Music events in Tokyo, playing rock arrangements of Sega's old songs. In the 2008 interview he said that normally he sits at his desk typing at a PC, so standing up to sing was a break.
We do not know what he felt on any of those days, and no interview we found says. What the record shows is a man who joined to play in a company band and ended up as the voice at the start of a game, in the jingle at its end, and later in the chair that decides how the whole game sounds. When the work you did on the way to something else becomes the thing people remember, whose work was it?