Manami Matsumae (松前真奈美) (b. 1964) has been composing for games since 1987 and still is today. She is most known for Mega Man (1987) and more recently for Shovel Knight (2014); and there are many more games she has done work for as well. Shovel Knight is a retro-inspired game both visually and musically, even taking some structural inspiration from Mega Man1 making it even more fitting that she contributed some work to the soundtrack. Matsumae sometimes used the alias “Chanchacorin” at Capcom. In 2017 she released her first solo album Three Movements, in which “she ventures into chiptunes, trance, orchestral, and ambient soundscapes – woven into a classical narrative that splits this blend of genres into three distinct parts.”2
Footnotes
- VentureBeat, “Mega Man, Castlevania, and Mario: Digging through Shovel Knight’s Retro Inspirations,” July 10, 2014, https://venturebeat.com/games/mega-man-castlevania-and-mario-digging-through-shovel-knights-retro-inspirations/.
- “Three Movements,” Brave Wave Productions, Bandcamp, https://bravewave.bandcamp.com/album/three-movements.
Image credit: IGN, “Shovel Knight – Review,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK2qYMpnOmk.