In 1989, a university student in Tokyo bought a Roland MC-300, a sequencer, with money from part-time jobs. According to his English Wikipedia profile, that purchase is what led him to apply for work as a game composer. He had no formal musical training. He had learned guitar in middle school, listening to Toto and Van Halen, and in college he played in a cover band for the fusion group T-Square. His name was Takayuki Nakamura. He was born on July 19, 1967.
Sega hired him part-time in September 1989, while he was still finishing his degree. One of his first jobs was the Mega Drive version of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker. In 1990 he became a full-time composer. He wrote for ESWAT: City Under Siege and Dick Tracy, and he is credited with sound programming on Streets of Rage. At that point his name was one line among many in the small print.
Then came AM2, the arcade team around Virtua Fighter. When the game reached arcades in 1993, he wrote its whole soundtrack. It was one of the first fighting games built from polygons, and the music had to sit beside a new kind of picture. For Virtua Fighter 2, he shared the composing with Takenobu Mitsuyoshi. Dates differ between sources on exactly when he moved to AM2, 1990 or 1991, so this page does not pin it down.
From 1994 he was also a sound director. That meant leading the sound team for the Sega Saturn versions of Virtua Fighter and Virtua Fighter 2, and for the Saturn version of Daytona USA. A composer who becomes a director spends more hours on other people's work: scheduling, checking, deciding what ships. Sources describe what this did to his own writing in different words. The English Wikipedia profile says that the management duties left him less time to compose, and that he found his work at Sega less interesting.
He left Sega in August 1996. He did not go to a rival console maker. He joined DreamFactory, a studio led by Seiichi Ishii, who had been lead designer of Virtua Fighter, and wrote the music, effects and sound programming for Tobal 2 in 1997 and the music for Ehrgeiz in 1998. The title on his door got lighter. The writing came back.
In October 1999 he founded his own company, BrainStorm. His first project as an independent was Kengo: Master of Bushido, released in 2000. A chair of his own is a bigger chair than any director's, and it came with a smaller room.
In 2004 a launch title for Sony's PSP appeared, a puzzle game called Lumines, designed by Tetsuya Mizoguchi. Nakamura joined as lead composer after a prototype already existed. The game turned the beat into the rule: blocks fall, and a line sweeps across the board in time with the music. A profile on a fan archive quotes him describing Lumines as a feeling like playing a musical instrument at a fundamental level. We could not trace that sentence to a first-hand interview, so treat it as secondhand.
The same year, his name appeared in the credits of Custom Robo on the GameCube. Sources disagree on his role there: Wikipedia lists music, other databases list sound direction. The credit itself is consistent. He kept returning to the same kind of job: a game that is already half-built, where the sound has to find its place. For Rodea the Sky Soldier, after hearing a prototype, he suggested acoustic guitar. In 2019 he was sound director of Shenmue III. Outside games, he designed sound systems for two exhibits at Tokyo's Miraikan science museum.
A player who loaded the first Virtua Fighter in 1993 heard music that none of them would call famous. It was written by one man who bought a sequencer. Years later he left a seat from which he could have run the department, because the seat had stopped letting him write. If the thing you are good at slowly turns into the work of watching others do it, what would you walk out for?