The Game Boy had four sound channels. Two pulse waves, one wave channel, one noise. The NES original had five — two pulse, one triangle, one noise, one sample. Kouji Murata sat at his desk in 1992, looking at the sheet music for a Mega Man stage theme, and knew he had to decide: what stays, and what goes.
Murata had graduated from Tateishiyama Shiga High School in 1981 and enrolled at Kinki University to study electronics. He did not complete the degree. By 1986, he had entered the video game industry, working on sound for NES titles published by Jaleco, Namco, Ultra, and Konami. This was an era when game composers were often uncredited, and sound production meant working directly with limited audio hardware. The NES had five channels, each one a territory to defend and a puzzle to solve.
In the late 1980s, Murata joined Konami, where he worked under the alias Lazy Koji. The name appears in the credits of several Konami titles from that period, including Ganbare Goemon 2. At Konami, his work required not only music composition but also sound effect production and the technical work of sound driver programming. The Game Boy was released in 1989, and every major publisher began looking for composers who could make music work inside its four-channel sound chip.
From 1990 to 1992, Murata worked at Minakuchi Engineering, a subcontractor Capcom relied on to handle sound production for some of its releases. Despite his involvement, his work on Capcom titles often went uncredited. The credits listed the publisher, sometimes the developer, rarely the individuals who built the sound. During this period, Capcom was preparing the Game Boy versions of its Mega Man series — adaptations of the NES originals, built for a smaller screen and a simpler sound system.
Murata was assigned as the main composer for Mega Man III, IV, and V on the Game Boy, released in 1992, 1993, and 1994 respectively. The challenge was clear: take the memorable themes from the NES originals and make them recognizable inside the Game Boy's constraints. He had to decide what to keep and what to lose. His arrangements kept the melodies intact while simplifying the bass lines and removing layered harmonies that would have cluttered the limited audio space. The results were not imitations but translations — the same music rebuilt for a different instrument.
Murata also designed a new sound driver for Bionic Commando on Game Boy, which was used for the remaining Game Boy games Minakuchi Engineering produced. A sound driver is the invisible machinery that makes notes play at the right time, in the right order, without crashing. It is technical work, not creative work, but without it, no melody exists. He built both the tool and the music.
After leaving Minakuchi Engineering, Murata continued working as a freelance sound programmer and composer. He moved away from composing game music in later years, shifting his focus to production and development management. Today he works as an Executive Producer at Bit Groove, a game development company. His name does not appear in the credits of many of the games he worked on. The music remains.
When you hear a melody on a small screen and recognize it instantly, someone made a choice about what could be lost without losing the song itself. That is not imitation. That is translation. And translation, done right, is a kind of creation — the act of carrying meaning across a gap that should not be crossable, and making it whole on the other side.