On September 11, 1987, a Famicom cartridge appeared in stores. Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. The people who played it said they had never heard game music like this. It was heavy, dark, gothic.
Tsukasa Masuko was born in Hokkaido in 1963. He studied sound engineering and in 1982 joined Tehkan — later known as Tecmo — as a part-time sound engineer while still a student at Japan Electronics College. He made sounds for arcade games. He graduated in 1984 and became a full-time employee.
In 1986, Masuko left Tehkan and joined Atlus. Atlus was a small company. There were seven founding members. Masuko was one of them. He became Atlus's primary composer.
In 1987, he composed the music for Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. While other games were writing bright melodies, Masuko wrote music that was dark, heavy, gothic. Distorted rock, brooding choir, an atmosphere of decay.
That choice was not safe. The Megami Tensei series was already unusual — demons, fusion, moral ambiguity. But Masuko's music gave that world a voice. The sound became inseparable from the series' identity. The darkness was not decoration. It was structural.
In 1990, Masuko left Atlus as a full-time employee. The reasons are not publicly detailed. But he continued to contribute to the series as a freelancer. In 1992, Shin Megami Tensei for the Super Famicom. In 1994, Shin Megami Tensei II.
Over the decades, Masuko's compositions have been rearranged by other composers, becoming recurring elements within the series. Several of his themes have taken on a life beyond their original context, appearing in later titles and remakes. In 2025, it was announced that he had joined the music team for Dark Auction, continuing his work as an independent composer more than forty years after he first entered the game industry as a part-time arcade worker.
His career is a record of what happens when someone refuses to soften the edges. The Megami Tensei series is now one of the longest-running RPG franchises in existence, and Masuko's music is part of the reason it has remained distinct. He brought rock into a place where most people were still writing cute tunes. The darkness stayed.
In 1987, when Tsukasa Masuko chose dark music, no one could guarantee it was the right choice. — When you stand before a choice with no guarantee, what do you trust?