NES · 1986
Ghosts ‘n Goblins
Arthur in the graveyard. One hit removes the armour. Two hits and it’s game over. The music makes it feel inevitable. Stage 1 theme: borrowed chords, minor key, pulse-wave dread.
Masashi Kageyama (影山雅志) was born in 1966 in Osaka, Japan. He joined Capcom’s internal sound team during the NES/Famicom era of the mid-1980s, entering the industry at a moment when the constraints of the Ricoh 2A03 chip - five channels, no reverb, no polyphony beyond simple harmony - defined what game music could be.
His breakthrough work is the NES port of Ghosts ‘n Goblins (Makaimura) (1986). Where the arcade original was composed by Ayako Mori using FM synthesis hardware, Kageyama started from scratch and composed an entirely new soundtrack for the Ricoh 2A03. The result was not a port of Mori’s music - it was an independent compositional work that used borrowed chords and modal mixture in ways unusual for NES music of the era.
The Stage 1 main theme became one of the most recognisable pieces of NES music ever written. Its harmonic language — minor key, borrowed chords, driving pulse-wave melody - gave the game an atmosphere of dread and inevitability that matched director Tokuro Fujiwara’s relentless difficulty design.
