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The entire Super Mario Bros (1985) Soundtrack is just under three minutes long- and that includes internal repetitions, of which there are many. If you remove the most obvious of those, less than 90 seconds of original music remains.
Despite the tunes bringing forth a flood of fond memories… nostalgia is only part of the picture. There’s something fundamentally engaging to the music itself - divorced from nostalgic ties.
For the early years of video arcades (circa 1971) game sound was not conceived of as music. It served, rather, a purely practical function, attracting new customers and providing feedback to gamers. Even today, the mast majority of arcade games include something called an attract mode: an “unplayable demonstration of a game that runs between play sessions… specifically designed to entice passersby to part with their money.”
Early composers were programmers and the principal focus was on computer languages and not composition. Given this shortage of musical expertise, it was common practice for companies to use pre-existing classic melodies… all the early hardware could handle.
Over the years Kondo has been asked to single out the music of which he is most proud. His choice is always the same: Overworld themes from Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.
After a while your body starts to beat in time with the game — you have so internalized the rhythm of its movement… you head back to your studio and translate the movement of your experience into sound.
Anything requiring more than three simultaneous notes was physically impossible on the NES due to its limited number of channels. This meant you had to employ techniques to trick the listener into believing there was more going on then there actually was.
If you tap your foot along while listening to the tune, you’ll notice that number of notes occur on the off-beat, while many rests occur on the beat.
Iwata: Before SMB came out, most games had a black background. Kondo: The blue sky was really refreshing. I wanted the music to match that, so I made the mistake of creating something easy-going, like you’re out a carefree walk. It got canned. I realized that easy-going wouldn’t match Mario’s running speed and his jumps.
The technology imposes limitations but composers may overcome or even aestheticize these limits.
Ezra Pound:
“music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.” For many cultures dance a music are inseparable.
Obviously disagree here.
SMB is interesting in that it lies on the cusp of a very important change in video-game culture - one in which the goal shifted from accumulating points to narrative-driven tasks. Bissell: “Mario is was among the first video games to suggest that it might contain a world.”