Hiroshi Kubota, a former Sega staffer who worked as a sound programmer and composer, has passed away, we're sad to report.
The news was broken by former colleague Koichi Namiki on social media and picked up by @allcityslopshop.com. According to Namiki, Kubota had been "battling illness for a long time."
Kubota joined Sega in 1989, and, as documented by Sega Retro, one of his earliest ventures was the Mega Drive port of Sorcerian, for which he composed half of the new tracks with Tokuhiko Uwabo.
He also arranged the music for Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, adapting Jackson's iconic songs for the Mega Drive version. Another arrangement task was taking Masato Nakamura's music for Sonic the Hedgehog and converting it to run in the Mega Drive's SMPS (Sample Music Playback System) sound engine.
He battled Ulcerative colitis in the mid-'90s, even going as far as to retire from Sega at the start of 1994. This was thankfully short-lived, and Kubota appears to have returned to the company in April of the same year.
Kubota's other credits include Advanced Daisenryaku: Deutsch Dengeki Sakusen (1991), Dyna Brothers (1992), Panic! (1993), Formula One World Championship: Beyond the Limit (1994), Ristar (1995) and Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage (1999).
As well as working in the realm of video games, Kubota was also an accomplished jazz pianist and performed at the weddings of Sega Sound Team members Masayuki Nagao, Kazuhiko Nagai, Chikako Kamatani and Yukifumi Makino.