Yuzo Koshiro was born on December 12, 1967, in Hino, Tokyo. His father was a painter. His mother, Tomo Koshiro, was a classical pianist who placed a piano in front of him when he was three years old and began teaching him to play. By age five, he could command the instrument. At eight, his mother arranged for him to study under Joe Hisaishi, who was then a rising film composer in Japan.
For three years, he learned music not from written scores. Hisaishi would play a phrase, and Koshiro would improvise the continuation — making music on the fly, trusting the ear before the eye. That method would define everything he created afterward.
In 1986, at age eighteen, Koshiro joined Nihon Falcom, a small game development company in Tokyo. He became one of the youngest professional game composers in Japan. He was given a PC-8801 computer and an FM synthesis sound chip that could produce only a handful of simultaneous tones. Most composers at the time treated game music as background filler — simple loops to keep the player company. Koshiro treated it as music first.
He composed the soundtracks for Ys I and Ys II, released in 1987 and 1988. The music did not sound like game music. It sounded like film scores compressed into three channels. Players noticed. They bought the games partly to hear the music. Some bought cassette tapes of the soundtracks separately. The music had become the product, not the accompaniment.
In 1988, Koshiro left Falcom and began working as a freelance composer. Sega contracted him to write music for The Revenge of Shinobi. Then for Streets of Rage. Then for Streets of Rage 2, released in 1992. He brought techno, house, and jungle — genres most game composers did not know existed — into the FM synthesis chip. The hardware was never built to play those sounds. He made it say what it was never supposed to say.
In 1990, on April 1, Koshiro co-founded Ancient Corp. with his mother Tomo and sister Ayano. Ancient was not a large company. It was a place where he could make games and music without waiting for approval from someone who did not understand the work. The same year, he composed the soundtrack for ActRaiser, a game about creation and destruction, orchestral themes meeting percussion and brass. Nintendo Power later called Koshiro 'arguably the greatest game-music composer of the 16-bit age.'
He continued making music for decades. He composed for the Etrian Odyssey series. For 7th Dragon. For new Streets of Rage titles that came out long after the original hardware had been retired. He did not wait for the hardware to catch up. He did not wait for the genres to be approved. He made the music he heard in his head, and the machines learned to speak it.
The question he answered is still open for the rest of us: What are you waiting for permission to make?