Yoshihito Yano remembers playing Ridge Racer on the PlayStation with friends, shortly after it came out. In his own words, 'before we knew it, 25 hours had passed.' He was a young man who had grown up copying pop songs and game music by ear, and he had just found a game that could swallow a whole day.
He was born on October 3, 1973, in Matsuyama, Ehime. He says he first touched a keyboard in elementary school and learned songs from television and games by ear. In college he joined a band circle and began writing music of his own. He also did judo in high school, and he says that gives him a musical sense as a writer.
Namco was the company behind the game that had taken his 25 hours. He sent in a demo tape. He says he applied for fun and never expected to be hired. In another interview he says the tape was not used in any game. Namco hired him anyway.
His debut was sound effects for a skiing arcade game, Alpine Racer 2. He used a synthesizer to make the sound of wind rushing past the player, and he changed the volume and the pitch to suggest speed during glides and jumps. He says he found it fun to play around and work out different ways to make a sound effect.
The work widened. Over the years his credits came to include Soulcalibur, Taiko no Tatsujin and The iDOLM@STER. In 2004 he worked on Katamari Damacy, the Namco game in which a tiny prince rolls the world into a ball. Yano says he wrote the lyrics, the music and the arrangement of an ending song for it, and recorded the vocals with the singer Shigeru Matsuzaki.
Yano says the recording session changed how he works. He says he was moved by Matsuzaki's professionalism, and by how hard he kept trying to entertain people, both in the studio and beyond the screen. 'It elevated my own approach to work,' Yano says, and it made him want to make a fan of everyone he meets through work. At MAGFest in January 2015 he described directing another Katamari singer syllable by syllable, deciding how long or short each one should be.
Later he was asked to make the sound identity for the whole Bandai Namco group. He recited the company's purpose statement aloud and studied how it sounded. He took walks at night murmuring the words 'Bandai Namco' to himself. 'I began to believe that the words Bandai Namco is music in and of itself,' he says, and he built the song's melody out of them.
He describes his method in one sentence: 'I try to transpose everything I encounter in life into sound.' A ski run became wind and pitch. A name became a melody. A day lost to a racing game, perhaps, became a reason to go and work where such games were made. If a sound can come from anything you pass in a day, what have you already walked past this week that was waiting to be heard?