Masashi
Kageyama

Masashi Kageyama joined Capcom’s internal sound team during the NES/Famicom era of the mid-1980s. His breakthrough work - the NES port of Ghosts ‘n Goblins (1986) - was not a transcription of Ayako Mori’s FM synthesis arcade score. It was a wholly new composition for the Ricoh 2A03’s five channels: two pulse waves, one triangle, one noise channel, one DPCM sample. The constraint was the instrument.

The Stage 1 main theme became one of the most recognisable pieces of NES music ever written. Its harmonic language - minor key, borrowed chords from the parallel major, driving pulse-wave melody - gave the game an atmosphere of dread and inevitability that matched director Tokuro Fujiwara’s relentless difficulty design. Read the full biography and credit research on the People page.

The musical analysis of Ghosts ‘n Goblins NES goes deeper than most game music writing gets to go. Kageyama composed for the Ricoh 2A03’s five channels with a specific harmonic approach - modal mixture, borrowed chords from the parallel major, and a five-voice texture that assigns each channel a distinct compositional function. The Stage 1 main theme is in A minor with borrowed chords that were unusual for NES game music of 1986.

The full analysis covers the Stage 1 main theme chord structure, the Graveyard BGM’s oppressive harmonic pace, the Village BGM’s deliberate tonal contrast, and how the 2A03’s pulse channels, triangle bass, and noise percussion combine to create dread rather than just accompaniment. It also covers the gameplay context - how a two-hit damage system, a two-loop structure, and a game designed to kill the player repeatedly shapes the listening experience of a score heard at every restart.

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