Hirokazu Tanaka is a Japanese video game composer, sound designer, musician and executive.  Tanaka began his career in the video game industry in 1980 after graduating from university with a degree in electronic engineering.  He joined Nintendo as a sound designer for their Research and Development 1 Division where he assisted with the creation of early arcade games.

He worked on the sound effects of many arcade games such as Space Firebird, Radar Scope and Donkey Kong before getting the opportunity to compose the music for his first game, Donkey Kong 3.  As part of Gunpei Yokoi’s R&D1 team Tanaka was involved with the development of the Game & Watch line of dedicated handheld devices where he handled the sound effects for several Game & Watch titles before shifting focus to Nintendo’s new home console the Family Computer, a.k.a. the Famicom. 

When the Famicom first released in Japan in 1983 many existing arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. were ported to the system.  Tanaka assisted with the ports of the arcade games while working in the sound department.  Rather than using the console’s internal drivers which most designers were using to create their games, Tanaka developed custom sequencers using his own programming language to maximise the Famicom’s sound chip capabilities and allowing direct access to the music source.  By 1984 Tanaka became the primary music composer for Nintendo’s R&D1 division creating scores for games such as Metroid, Kid Icarus and Mother.

In addition to handling sound design for games he worked along side Gunpei Yokoi on hardware development beginning with the Nintendo Zapper and would continue to contribute in hardware development with the Game Boy’s sound hardware, Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer.  While working on the Game Boy peripherals during business hours Tananka at the advice of Tsunekazu Ishihara joined Creatures Inc as a guest composer and composed multiple songs for the first Japanese Pokémon anime. 

Due to a Nintendo corporate policy which did not allow employees to work for other companies he decided to resign from his position at Nintendo and joined Creatures Inc. full-time in 1999.  In 2000, Tanaka succeeded Ishihara as the President of Creatures Inc when Ishihara became president of “The Pokémon Company” to oversee and manage all aspects of the Pokémon franchise. His current job responsibilities consist of supervision of Pokémon products and, occasionally composing some additional songs for the anime series.