Masanobu Tsukamoto spent three days on one sound. It was lightning. Not the crack of the strike, but the rumble before it — the sound that makes you glance up at the sky in a video game and remember there is supposed to be weather above you. He was working on M.U.S.H.A., a vertical scrolling shooter for the Sega Genesis, and the Megadrive's FM sound playback system gave him exactly two channels to work with. Every sound had to be small, fast, and out of the way. He built the thunder. It took three days.
Tsukamoto was born on December 10, 1968, in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture. He graduated from the University of Tsukuba in 1991 with a degree that could have taken him to any number of large electronics firms. Instead, he joined Compile — a small software company known for puzzle games and shooters. His job title was not composer. It was sound effects designer. He made the small noises: the beep of a menu selection, the whoosh of a jump, the satisfying click when a puzzle piece locks into place. Music is what players remember. Sound effects are what they feel.
At Compile, roles overlapped. Tsukamoto worked across multiple projects, sometimes credited, sometimes not. When he was credited, the name was often MATS — an abbreviation taken from the first two letters of his given and family names. The name stuck. Years later, when he left Compile and went freelance, MATS became the name clients knew him by.
The work was precise and invisible. In later years, Tsukamoto said in an interview: 'When I listen to those fx today, I find myself wanting to redo half of them.' He was not being modest. He meant it. The discipline of sound design is unforgiving in a particular way — you are building the texture that makes a game feel responsive and alive, but if anyone notices your work, you have probably failed. A good sound effect disappears into reflex. The player hears it, acts on it, and moves on. They do not stop to think about who made the jump sound or how many iterations it took to make the menu beep feel right.
Tsukamoto worked closely with programmer Yuichi Toyama to synchronize sound to action. The Genesis had four sound channels total per song: drums, bass, melody, and one more. If he used a sound that clashed with the music, the music would drop out or the sound would never play. 'I also worried,' he said in the same interview, 'that if I used a sound similar to ones we'd used before, it would disrupt Kazoda's music.' Every sound had to fit into a space it did not own.
One sound became famous without him intending it. He designed a 1-UP sound for one of the Aleste games — a bright, ascending chime that signaled the player had earned an extra life. Later, someone at Compile reused it in Puyo Puyo without asking. The sound became one of the most recognizable in the entire franchise. Tsukamoto did not like that it had been repurposed. He had designed it for a shooter, not a puzzle game, and the context mattered to him. But the sound stayed. It fit.
For the pilot's eye-sparkle sound in M.U.S.H.A., Tsukamoto drew inspiration from Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack — the sharp, metallic ping that signals focus or realization. He built it into the game. Players who grew up with that sound may not know where it came from, but they recognize the feeling it evokes. That was the work: building a sensory language that players would carry with them without ever learning its grammar.
Tsukamoto stayed at Compile until 1996. Five years after joining, he left to work as a freelance contractor. The reasons for his departure are not publicly recorded, but the mid-1990s were a volatile period for Japanese game studios — the industry was shifting from cartridges to CDs, from 2D to 3D, and many small companies either adapted or disappeared. He moved on. Over the years that followed, he contributed to dozens of games across multiple platforms, still often uncredited or listed under variations of his name.
What he left behind at Compile was not a catalog of melodies but a presence — the impression that the worlds Compile built were not just drawn and programmed but inhabited. The beep you heard when you selected a character. The whoosh when a piece fell. The crack of thunder before the lightning. These were the sounds that made the game feel like it was listening to you, responding to your hands. Tsukamoto built those sounds, one channel at a time, three days at a time, knowing that if he did his job well, no one would ever notice his name. And they did not. But they felt the world. — When you finish your work today, will anyone know your name? And if they do not — did the work still matter?