Takenobu Mitsuyoshi is widely renowned as the "singing sound creator" of Sega. He became famous for the vocal tracks he provided for the soundtrack to Daytona USA, and later, in the Sega Saturn era, he achieved sound quality better than arcade standards on home consoles thanks to CD-DA technology. While the whole story behind this will be on Mr. Mitsuyoshi's own column, SEGA SOUND STREET on Beep21, here's the full interview originally published in Sega Hard Historia as a prelude to that series.
He joined Sega in 1990 and made his name working on arcade games like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA. Mitsuyoshi became widely recognized as a sound creator who also performs vocals—notably on the album Virtua Fighter 2: Dancing Shadows—and subsequently became active in Sega's official sound unit H. In recent years, he has been involved in rhythm games and remains active in many sound-related roles.
SEGA SOUND STREET on Beep21 features memoirs from "singing sound creator" Takenobu Mitsuyoshi himself. The first five installments of this series focused on Daytona USA, but now, parts six and seven—celebrating the release of the Sega Rally Championship 30th Anniv. Album (celebrating the 30th anniversary of the arcade and Saturn versions alike)—will be a two-part special dedicated to the arcade and Sega Saturn versions of Sega Rally Championship!
— Mitsuyoshi-san, you’re still active in many fields. What have you been working on lately?
Takenobu Mitsuyoshi: I don't think my work has changed much. I used to be involved with all kinds of music for arcade and console games, but as of late, I’ve been focused mainly on sound for projects like Virtua Fighter, card games, and rhythm games.
— You joined Sega in 1990. That was over three decades ago now—what was the company like, back in the day?
Mitsuyoshi: If I'm not mistaken, we were still listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange; I don't think we'd made it to the First Section yet.
— Sega listed in the Second Section on April 1988 and moved to the First Section in October 1990. The company had some serious momentum at the time.
Mitsuyoshi: I didn't understand any of that stuff when I joined Sega, I didn't even know about any momentum. But there was something about Sega—they were mysterious, in a good way. They had a kind of international vibe.
— Sega's origins were as a foreign-owned company. Did it still have that vibe when you joined, in 1990?
Mitsuyoshi: Yes. It wasn’t a very big company at the time, but it definitely felt that way. I became interested in video game music after I listened to the soundtrack of Galaxy Force (1988) when I was a student. Sega employees were corporate workers, but they were musicians by profession—they had bands, like S.S.T. Band, performing at events and releasing CDs. They even recorded with professional musicians, and I thought it was amazing, even though I didn’t really get the full picture. I spent four years in the light music club in college, so I joined Sega because I wanted to make a living through music. I didn't really see Sega as a massive corporation at the time. It had a bit of a foreign feel to it, but I joined because I felt I could turn my hobby—music, which I'd been doing for four years as a student—into a career.
— What games did you play during your student days?
Mitsuyoshi: I got hooked on Namco’s Sangokushi: Chugen no Hasha during my senior year, so much that I almost didn't finish my graduation thesis! (laughs) I also played games like Spartan X and Kung-Fu Master on the PC Engine. But I was more of a PC gamer at the time. I owned a PC-6001mkII, and I played games like Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom.
— Any arcade games?
Mitsuyoshi: I started playing arcade games back when Space Invaders took off. Arcades had a bit of a scary reputation, so I’d only play every once in a while. And then, during my senior year of college, a younger student played the soundtrack to Galaxy Force in his car. The tone was completely different from any game music I’d heard before, and that really opened my mind. By the time I pursued a career in games, I'd played many different video games.
— When you joined Sega, where were you first assigned?
Mitsuyoshi: I was assigned to Sega R&D 8, where Yu Suzuki worked. At the time, I was working in the AM (amusement machine) department, which developed “taiken games” for arcades, and I was the third person to join its sound team. The department chief was my mentor Hiroshi “Hiro” Kawaguchi, and my senior was Yasuhiro “Yas” Takagi, who composed for Turbo Out Run (1989); he joined right before I did. Takagi-san had graduated from a music college, but I had a degree in economics! I was probably an anomaly, because I didn't have a background in music.
Translator's note: “Sega Taiken games” (セガ体験ゲーム) were arcade games that, instead of being controlled by simple joysticks, had large cabinets that simulated real vehicles and cockpits. These games included After Burner, Space Harrier, and Hang-On.
— So: at the time, was Sega R&D 8 working on console (Mega Drive) games at the same time they made arcade games?
Mitsuyoshi: Yeah, they were doing quite a lot. We weren't limited to arcades—we were also making games like Sword of Vermilion for the Mega Drive. Mentor Hiro was working on Rent a Hero, and I actually performed the voice of the protagonist, Taro Yamada, doing battle cries like “hyaa!” (laughs) Later on, the sound teams for console and arcade games merged into a single division. That's when we handled the Mega Drive port of Virtua Racing, and I worked on porting the music to that version. I think we used a DSP chip.
— Was doing voice work just a coincidence, whether it was Taro Yamada in Rent a Hero or the voices in Virtua Fighter (like Akira and Kage-Maru)?
Mitsuyoshi: I don't know either. (laughs) I guess I was asked to try it out, and since I'm not the type to be averse to that sort of thing, I probably just went along.
— What was the view on home consoles, within Sega, at the time?
Mitsuyoshi: I remember that arcade games had sound and graphics with higher quality than those of home consoles. Because of that, the arcade and console departments had distinct roles; the idea was that handling console ports within the same department would create corporate synergy.
— After a while, the arcade sector was shifting toward 3D boards like the Model 1 and Model 2, and home consoles were also moving to the next generation. What do you feel changed the most with the Sega Saturn's arrival?
Mitsuyoshi: In terms of sound: the shift from the Mega Drive to the Sega Saturn really came down to moving to CD-DA. On the Mega Drive, it was important to figure out how to produce as many sounds as possible within the hardware limits. But once the Sega Saturn came out, we could output the actual audio pre-recorded, which needed a whole different set of skills. That led to a huge shift in the process of sound design and music composition. As games like Virtua Fighter and Virtua Fighter 2 were ported to consoles, I was driven to create home console music that sounded even better than the arcade originals. In fact, I’d wanted to produce CD-quality music and sound effects in a video game ever since I first joined Sega. I felt the Saturn's arrival really made that possible, and I remember being highly motivated to work at the time. The shift to CD-DA on the Saturn, and the ensuing ability to use pre-recorded audio, meant I could incorporate actual vocals alongside the instruments, and I'd say that audio technology took a massive leap forward in that time.
— I thought the PlayStation had some great sound specs...
Mitsuyoshi: Now I can admit it: I agree. (laughs) I loved Resident Evil (1996). I was still working on Shenmue for the Saturn at the time, and I thought, “this is kind of the same genre [as Shenmue]”, so I played it just for reference, and I got hooked. The streaming audio was really good in particular, especially the reverb—or whatever you call that resonance—was excellent. Playing it made me feel like that trying to achieve those results on the Saturn would have been difficult... deep down, I wondered if we couldn't just make Shenmue for the PlayStation instead! (laughs) Fortunately the Saturn used CD-DA, so high sound quality was a guarantee. But there were limitations, like seek times, so we couldn't just play back anything at any time. I remember it was a real challenge that needed a lot of ingenuity and clever workarounds. So , when Shenmue was set to be made for the Dreamcast and not the Saturn, I was relieved. I thought, “thank goodness [for the sound tech]!” I was also a little jealous of Sony's PlayStation 2, because I thought Sony was pulling off some stylish stuff with its sound.
— You started singing a lot more during that time, right?
Mitsuyoshi: Yu Suzuki-san said to me: “We're putting out a vocal image album for Virtua Fighter 2, want to try singing a few tracks?” and I just replied, “Sure!” (laughs) I didn't mind singing, so I think I did fine without considering my skills. Then, Yu-san told me: “We're making a Virtua Fighter anime, would you like to sing the opening theme for Season 2?” and I agreed. As I kept doing those jobs, Sega started putting out a demand for me as a singer. For Burning Rangers, Naofumi Hataya—who was in charge of sound synchronization—asked me to sing on a demo track, and he played it for Yuji Naka—who was producer at the time. And he said it worked well. That's when Sega's employees started seeing me as “the guy who sings for the games”.
Victory Goal '96 also played a part. When I worked on Daytona USA, I used to create everything by myself—the music, the sound effects, even the vocals on songs. But with Victory Goal, the scope of my work began to grow beyond just audio development. I started moving into singing and character voice acting.
— Was the Saturn era particularly memorable to you?
Mitsuyoshi: Unlike with the Mega Drive, I was involved with the Sega Saturn all the way from the start of development. As a software person, I felt like I was working with the hardware team to build the system and create hype for it. I look back very fondly on the work we all did to make the Saturn the best it could be: thinking long and hard about the audio and sound design when porting games like Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA. I was deeply and intensely immersed in my work, at the time.
— After the Saturn, came the Dreamcast. How did you view that new hardware?
Mitsuyoshi: I was excited, as in, punching the air in joy. At the time, I was the sound director for Shenmue, and everything Yu [Suzuki]-san asked of me just couldn't be done on the Saturn! (laughs) For example, he wanted the game to be fully voiced, but a standard CD just didn't have the capacity for all that. So when we switched to GD-ROM for the Dreamcast, the greater max capacity of 1GB was a huge relief. Of course, there were many voiced lines and we got even more to match the bigger capacity, so the memory constraints came right back. (laughs) But it was a relief to move to new hardware. The graphical quality would be much better too. After all, the characters we'd made for the Saturn were really pushing the limits of polygon counts. In many ways—be it in sound or graphics—I hoped that development might proceed much more smoothly.
— So, what was the Dreamcast actually like?
Mitsuyoshi: For better or worse, it didn't really have that “Sega” feel. When I joined the company, “Sega” was synonymous with the company president Hayao Nakayama, and the motto was “Creation is Life!” Then [Shoichiro] Irimajiri-san came over from Honda to become Executive Vice President and launched the Dreamcast; it had this stylish vibe to it that, in a way, didn't feel like the Sega I knew.
— Sounds like you remember more about Shenmue than you can name off the top of your head. Were you that committed to the game?
Mitsuyoshi: My involvement with Shenmue started when it was still being made for the Saturn. The game had about 300, maybe 400 tracks, and we had over twenty people working on the music.
— It's really unusual... to have twenty people working on the sound for a single game!
Mitsuyoshi: We were playing the game almost every week, going over it with the scenario, planning and sound departments. We had some real deep talks about the game, like, “not like that!” “Do it like this!” And so on. The sound department also had a weekly meeting where we presented newly-composed tracks to Yu-san. I'd play a track and say something like, “this would work well for this kind of scene”, or, “I wrote this specifically for a battle scene.” I worked non-stop, practically without sleeping, to translate Yu-san's ideas into sound in ways no one else could've thought of at the time. It's an experience that could only have happened in that era... I went through the ringer, but I also gained a lot of meaningful learning experiences.
— As a sound creator, how would you rate the Dreamcast?
Mitsuyoshi: I didn't feel it was as limited as the Saturn, and to be frank, as developers, we all thought it was a system that could compete on equal footing for a much longer time.
— How did you find out about the Dreamcast's discontinuation?
Mitsuyoshi: That was the sort of thing that happened at Sega, but it all came so suddenly, still. It really caught me off-guard. But our main focus was on the arcade business, so—with due apologies to those working on the home console departments at the time—we might have had a bit of an attitude like, “We’ll keep pushing ahead with high-quality, hi-tech games for arcades.” We didn't have a bad relationship, but the departments dedicated to consoles and arcades were totally separate entities. For instance, at the end of the fiscal year, you'd hear that the console branch struggled, but the arcade branch had a great year. For better or worse, the two divisions worked independently, and they figured that one's final results would even the other's out. It was like, “The console guys do their own thing and we do ours.” Looking back now, though, that might have been a bit too detached and narrow-minded.
— Mitsuyoshi-san, can you give us your personal opinion on why the Dreamcast didn't succeed?
Mitsuyoshi: Some might point to factors like promotion or strategy, but from a developer's perspective: we had an “arcade-style” approach to game creation. There was a lot of trial and error where we'd break a game down and build it back up. This is mainly based on my experiences with Shenmue. We'd write code and plan the concepts at the same time, without formal design documents. We’d build something, then tear it apart and rebuild it from the ground up... For better or worse, our games were created based on our past arcade successes, and that might have been our main difference from Sony with the PlayStation. The Dreamcast was a fantastic console, well ahead of its time, but looking back, some of its games were made in a really clumsy way. It makes me wonder if we could've done things more efficiently.
— On the flip side: if Sega were still making consoles today, what kind of console do you think they’d be releasing?
Mitsuyoshi: Sega was already doing what we now call “VR” over 20 years ago, right? In fact, Sega equipped the Dreamcast with online network capabilities even before the infrastructure was in place for it.
I really hope the concept of “cutting-edge innovation” remains unchanged. I've been working with Sega since 1990—that's over thirty years now—and I still want to see that same spirit from back in the day, that feeling of “I don't know what I'm doing, but it's fun”, or “Sega's doing something crazy, that's so funny!” (laughs) So, if Sega was still making home consoles, I imagine they'd be going further than the hot topics of the moment, like 5G or AI. I don't know if that's “typical Sega”, but I feel like Sega's taking that feeling of “something new” and creating games that turn the adversity of a world ravaged by COVID-19 into entertainment. Even if Sega were still making hardware in the 2020s, I think that forward-thinking spirit would still be there—and I certainly hope it would. Now that I think about it that way, I feel like they'd create things that don’t exist here right now, things the world has never seen before.
— What kind of company was Sega to you, Mitsuyoshi-san?
Mitsuyoshi: The name “Sega” means so much to me. The company has changed a lot, many times, since I joined, but I think the “Sega spirit” has endured the whole time. From my own experiences recording overseas, every time a local orchestra member or a band musician asked me where I was from, I'd tell them I was there to compose video game music for Sega. And they'd say things like, “Sega games?! I've played one!” “What game did you work on?” “I know that game!” The name “Sega” was my calling card. I truly feel that the name of Sega has given me a lot of help. Even now, I feel the same deep attachment to the name “Sega” as Sega fans do. If possible, I hope Sega stays around forever, and I'll do my part to make that happen. I’m genuinely happy that this book allows me to share those memories with fans from that time. It means a lot to be able to deliver an article to them in this format—even if it's a bit of an overstatement to say I’m proud to do it. I hope everyone who's played Sega games over the years can continue to treasure the memories and history they've built playing Sega's games.
Recorded on November 26, 2020, at Sega; re-edited in May 2024)
Originally released on SEGA hard historia (SB Creative, 2021)