Shinji Hosoe

Shinji Hosoe (born February 28, 1967), also known as MEGATEN and SamplingMasters MEGA, is a Japanese video game composer and musician most famous for scoring Ridge Racer, Street Fighter EX and many Namco arcade games between 1987 and 1996. He also created the in-game music for Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. He was assisted by Yuki Kajiura on the project, though he did not return as a composer for Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra. He also runs the music production and publishing company SuperSweep, alongside long time collaborator Ayako Saso. Outside of the video game industry he has a few side projects, most notably Sampling Masters and Oriental Magnetic Yellow (OMY), the latter of which is a parody band of Yellow Magic Orchestra he formed with fellow Namco composers Nobuyoshi Sano, Takayuki Aihara and Hiroto Sasaki. (Wikipedia)

Hosoe was not interested in music until Junior High where he got a synthesizer and began to play on it and joined a cover band. He attended the Japan Electronics Collenge in 1985 for computer graphics and graduated in 1987. In August 1985 at age 18, he started working for Namco, testing music for some of their games. A couple years down the road, he started composing music for some of their arcade games, and eventually some arrangements for their PS1 games. He also formed many units, most notably Sampling Masters, which consists of Ayako Saso, Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara. He left in March 1996 and started working at Arika the next month alongside Saso and Aihara who wanted to continue working with him. In February 2000, he left Arika and founded SuperSweep, a company that produces music and sound for games. Hosoe still composes music for games to this day.