In 1987, Capcom was a company of about two hundred people. The music department had outgrown the main building in Osaka, so it rented space in another building across the street. In August of that year, one of its newest members was told she would write all the music for a Famicom game called Mega Man. The game had to ship in December.
Manami Matsumae had studied piano at Osaka University of Arts. She has said she applied to Capcom believing that if the job did not come, she could still become a piano teacher. Her first piece at the company was a single track for a mahjong game, Ide Yosuke Meijin no Jissen Mahjong, which she later described as an experimental piece. When it passed, she says, she was assigned to Mega Man.
The job was larger than the title suggests. 'I was still new at that time, and I had to compose music, create sound effects, and program the data in three months,' she told Game Music Online in 2010. A later interview puts the assignment in August and the release in December, which is closer to four months. Sources differ on the exact figure. She also gave the pressure a plain description: 'My butt was on fire.'
The Famicom's sound chip could play three pitched tones and one noise channel. 'It was tough to compose with only three notes at a time, but I absolutely loved it,' she said. Then she added what, to her, the fun had been: 'It was fun to reduce the data to fit within the limitations.'
The idea that Mega Man's music should be memorable is often told as an order from above. In her own account, it was her request. 'When I told the planner I wanted to create a lively melody song that was easy to remember, like that of an anime song, he told me, "That's OK!"' Years later she described her method in similar terms: 'I would think of catchy, easy-to-memorise melodies, and repeat those as well.' And on the cost of the machine: 'Basically, with data limitations, we had to keep everything simple.'
She also kept a small trick for the days when no melody came. 'I created sound effects when I couldn't come up with any good ideas for the music at all,' she said. 'That was often very refreshing, and I was able to write without any problems afterwards.' Mega Man went on sale in December 1987. After it, she moved to Capcom's arcade team, because, in her words, 'those games offered more sound channels to work with.' She has also said that at Capcom in those years, overtime was the norm.
She left Capcom around 1990 (sources give 1990 or 1991). 'I decided to get married and move to Tokyo,' she told Kotaku in 2021. She asked whether she could keep working for Capcom as a freelancer, but the company already had many composers. So she visited game companies in Tokyo and received several offers. Her first freelance job was the horse-racing series Derby Stallion. 'However,' she has said of it, 'I tried to make the melody easy to remember.' Freelancing, she told Kotaku, meant she could work from home on whatever schedule suited her.
In 2010 she returned to Mega Man for the tenth game, working in 8-bit again, and in 2014 she contributed music to Shovel Knight through the Tokyo label Brave Wave. 'I myself had no idea Mega Man would go on for this long,' she said. If you were handed only three notes at a time, which would you play, and could you say, as she did, that you loved it?