The man who wrote the Green Hill Zone theme had a day job, and it was being a pop star. Masato Nakamura, who composed the music for the first two Sonic the Hedgehog games, is best known in Japan as the bass player and a co-founder of the J-pop band Dreams Come True), which he has been part of since 1988, Video Games Chronicle reports. So one of the most recognisable tunes Sega ever shipped came from someone who already wrote songs for people who had never touched a Mega Drive.
That is the first handover in a pattern worth following. Sonic's music has passed between three very different kinds of composer: a chart musician, a fan who applied to Sega because of the first game, and a fan who got noticed for remixes on YouTube. My read is that each handover doubles as a guess about who Sonic is. And I'd argue the series sounds most like itself when the person holding the pen grew up loving it.
The pop star years
Nakamura's crossover runs deeper than a résumé line. According to VGC, Dreams Come True's 1992 album The Swinging Star includes a song called "Sweet Sweet Sweet", which he later reworked into the Sonic 2 end credits. Pop song to game credits, same composer. To me that fits a mascot pitched as a bright, catchy star rather than a cartoon hedgehog, though VGC only reports the reuse, not what Sega intended by it.
The loop closed in 2021. For Sonic's 30th anniversary, Dreams Come True released "Tsugino Seno! De – On The Green Hill", which puts lyrics on the original Green Hill Zone theme, VGC says. Nakamura composed it and bandmate Miwa Yoshida wrote the words. It came in two versions: a slower one used in the music video and a faster remix closer to the Mega Drive original. Yuji Naka, the original game's lead programmer, even pointed out Sonic-like sound effects in the track, per VGC.
Nakamura talked through how he made that first Green Hill Zone music in the third part of a 20th anniversary Sonic documentary, which Gematsu posted in November 2011. Three decades after the first game, the same melody got a new life as a band single.
The fan who brought a guitar
Jun Senoue's route in was different, and a lot more relatable. "I loved the first Sonic The Hedgehog game released on Sega Genesis in 1991, including its music," he told Game Informer in 2021, adding that "that was the reason I picked Sega to apply for in 1992." He applied because of Sonic, and then he got to write Sonic.
His early work came with a very 1990s workflow. On Sonic the Hedgehog 3, the development team was in the suburbs of San Francisco while Senoue was in Tokyo, so, as he told Game Informer, "we sent the DAT tapes by airmail to the development team," and notes came back by fax. He never met the lead programmer or lead designer in person during development.
Then Sonic learned to talk. On Sonic Adventure, where Senoue was sound director and lead composer, the characters spoke for the first time, and he wanted the music to change with them. "Using English lyrics and a variety of musicality meant better expressing their personality and attitude," he told Game Informer, with guitar-driven rock at the core.
For the main theme, "Open Your Heart", he went after a singer he had admired since Hardline's 1992 album: Johnny Gioeli. Game Informer says the two first met at a studio near Los Angeles in September 1998 to record it, and Senoue wrote the song "on the assumption that he would sing on it." The pair kept working together, first as Sons Of Angels on seven songs for the arcade game NASCAR Arcade in 1999, then on "Live & Learn" for Sonic Adventure 2, and it's as Crush 40 that fans know them. Senoue says he finished the full arrangement of "Live & Learn" in one day.
This is where Senoue's own words do the arguing for me: talking characters needed English lyrics and rock to carry "their personality and attitude." Whether that suited every game is a fair fight. That it gave Sonic songs fans still sing along to is harder to argue with. Crush 40 didn't play live for its first 10 years, Senoue said; the first full-band show came in 2011, for Sonic's 20th anniversary.
His rule for game songs is practical rather than precious: "The tempo of the song is basically determined by its usage in the game." Even the rock era answered to the level design.
The remixer who got the call
The third handover is the one that sounds made up. Tee Lopes came to Sega's attention after posting remixes and reimaginings of tracks like Spring Yard Zone to YouTube, and after scoring the fan project Sonic 2 HD, PC Gamer reported in 2017. Then he scored Sonic Mania.
As PC Gamer puts it, the classic 1990s sound of Sonic is what Mania is all about. Lopes told the outlet his first idea was to imagine what a sequel to 1993's Sonic CD would have sounded like, before the soundtrack "kinda became its own thing," borrowing from several Sonic and other Sega games. He even recorded his own vocal samples and processed them, because "sampling was a big thing in the classic Sonic era, and I was trying to emulate that trend here."
His mini-boss theme, "Danger on the Dance Floor", was meant to be "childish, cheeky, with an almost mocking tone," he said. PC Gamer also points out nods only a Sega obsessive would plant, like a main menu tune that sounds a bit like Sega Rally's car select music. Lopes left the rest for players: "I think it's more fun if the fans spot these references themselves!" That's a fan talking to fans.
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