Manami Matsumae wrote both the music and the sound effects for the first Mega Man. That meant composing its stage themes and deciding how a shot or an explosion would interrupt them. Her later work ranges from Capcom arcade scores to the horse-racing series Derby Stallion, Dragon Quest Swords and Shovel Knight.
A piano graduate at Capcom
Born in 1964, Matsumae studied piano at Osaka University of Arts and joined Capcom in April 1987. Chris Greening’s biography records a training assignment on Ide Yosuke Meijin no Jissen Mahjong before Mega Man. The familiar platform game was not her first composition for the company.
In an interview with Mohammed Taher, Matsumae recalled imagining Mega Man as an anime hero and aiming for a melody players could remember. Cut Man’s theme was the first approved. Bach’s writing for several independent musical parts helped her compose for a small number of voices; unfamiliar with writing drums, she studied recordings by artists including Phil Collins.
The sound effects competed with the music. She shortened them to reduce interruptions, though she acknowledged that some notes still disappeared during play. These were decisions about how the complete game should sound, beyond whether an individual tune worked on its own.
Arcades and freelance work
After moving to arcade projects, she wrote music for games including U.N. Squadron and Carrier Air Wing. In her VGMO career interview, she described the extra freedom of arcade sound alongside a different problem: music had to be heard in a noisy amusement arcade.
Freelance work brought different briefs. For Derby Stallion, Hiroyuki Sonobe supplied images of the game, and Matsumae chose pastoral music and marches. Later entries retained that approach. A horse-racing simulation needed a different atmosphere from an action game, even when she was composing for similarly limited machines.
Koichi Sugiyama invited her to work on Dragon Quest Swords. In the same interview, she recalled his emphasis on memorable melodies rather than asking her to copy his style. She found the ending particularly difficult because it had to bring the adventure to a satisfying close.
Returning to older sounds
For Mega Man 10, Matsumae returned to the series with Nitro Man’s stage music. Her brief was character artwork and a request for an energetic tempo, according to the Taher interview.
Her two Shovel Knight pieces appear on its 2014 soundtrack as “A Thousand Leagues Below (Iron Whale)” and “Flowers of Antimony (The Explodatorium)”. Jake Kaufman composed the main score. In a later VGMO interview, Matsumae said her contributions were written early, before the project’s overall musical direction had been settled. She welcomed working within familiar sound limitations again.
The 2017 solo album Three Movements presented her music outside a game. Brave Wave’s release credits list her as composer, programmer and mixer, apart from the two guest remixes. Game work continued: the publisher’s page for Battle Axe, released in 2021, credits her soundtrack alongside Henk Nieborg’s pixel art.
Sources
- Chris Greening, “Manami Matsumae Profile”, VGMO, April 2013 — secondary biography: birth, university, joining Capcom and first assignment.
- Mohammed Taher, “A Conversation with Manami Matsumae”, translated by Alex Aniel, Brave Wave — primary interview: Mega Man composition, sound effects and Nitro Man.
- “Manami Matsumae Interview: A Career After Mega Man”, VGMO — primary recollections of arcade work, Derby Stallion and Dragon Quest Swords.
- “Manami Matsumae Interview: A Retro Revival”, VGMO — primary account of her Shovel Knight contributions.
- Jake Kaufman, Shovel Knight Original Soundtrack, 27 June 2014 — primary album credits, tracks 20 and 33.
- Brave Wave, Three Movements, 17 December 2017 — primary release and production credits.
- Numskull Games, Battle Axe, Steam — primary publisher listing: 2021 release and composer credit.