“Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday Night’s Alright” Hm-hmm, Elton John aside, your weekly injection of gaming music starts right here.
You can get pumped up for going out, or get in the right frame of mind for just chilling out after a hard week at work/school/whatever. Every week, I’ll be bringing you an iconic track from the video game archives, some you’ll know, some you won’t, some I probably won’t even know, but whatever way, it’ll be a journey.
This first edition, I’m bringing you probably the most iconic video game theme EVER! The Overworld Theme from Super Mario Bros. (1985, NES)
Everyone knows it, and if you don’t where the hell have you been, man? Here’s a sample just to remind you of it (complete with the Sheet Music for it. Sheet Music! It’s THAT popular. You need to click play in the little player at the top, by the way), not that you need reminding of it. Aw heck, just go listen to it, it’s brilliant.
Composed by Koji Kondo for the 1985 classic, it apparently took the longest time of the six featured tracks to compose and was the toughest for Kondo-san to make , going through multiple changes as the development of the game progressed. The Latin beat driving the melody along, the funky bassline complimenting the tune effortlessly, while creating a stylistic dichotomy with the chording. It’s catchy as all hell too. Just as well it is, seeing as how it was written for one of the most iconic games in the history of gaming and the flagship for Nintendo’s NES console and Ninty themselves.
Provoking images of Italian plumbers in boiler suits, mutant mushrooms, freakish winged turtles and princesses in other castles, it’s got the unserious, family-friendly attitude, is light-hearted and accessible. No overbearing or foreboding overtones here (they come in the underworld theme). Heck, you could stick it on in a club and people would move to it, possibly singing along to the tune.
It just proves that Koji Kondo is one of the best composers in the Japanese gaming market, as he scored not only Mario, but Zelda games too. Fun-loving with a great attitude and a killer head for notes, he’s one of my gaming heroes.
To this day, 25 years after it was first heard by the gaming world, it is still popular, regularly lauded and lampooned, homaged and covered with a distorted guitar on YouTube. For crying out loud, it’s older than us oldies here on StartGame (me and LS), but that doesn’t make it any less awesome.
Anyway, 2, 3, 4… “Mario looks cute in his braces and boots, a handful of coins in his hat.”
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