Game:

Super Mario Bros. (1985)

Duration: 1:26

5 views

0

Composed by Yasunori Nishiki
Arranged by Maelstrom (https://www.ninsheetmusic.org)

My third past cover, with no further technical applications as of this point. A bit of a smaller, simpler piece, but fits right in within its context. In the game, this piece serves as a character theme, used to depict a wise and seasoned hunter living in a quiet village. At this point of production, I wanted to show people various aspects of VGM, pulling songs from different games, situations and contexts to show its breadth and depth. For instance, "Where We Used to Be" was used to introduce opening pieces and title songs, while "Duet" was used to depict emotional scenes. As I mentioned before, this piece is used to describe a character, where words and expression may not be able to succeed in depicting in a piece. Not only that, but a lot can be told about a person quickly through music, and it prevents the jarring interruptions of using text to add in an attribute to a character. I also used this piece to introduce the notion of looping music, and the fact that this song loops in on itself. It's common for video games to have looping music due to the fact that games back then had limited space, and to accommodate for player pacing. What do I mean by both of these? Let's take the classic Super Mario Bros. theme as an example. This was a game for the NES, and the cartridge couldn't hold a lot of data, which is why the song loops, as a way of keeping and reusing a shorter piece. Now in the modern day, this wouldn't be an issue. However, accommodating for player pacing is still an important factor. Going back to the Super Mario Bros. example, there's no way of telling how long a player would take in completing a stage, and the game would feel empty if the piece abruptly ended before someone can finish the level. Thus, the solution would once again be looping music. In modern context, this example can be true, but can also apply to other situations, such as reading through in-game text, or time spent staying in a single area.

And that's about everything for this past cover. I believe that there are only 1-2 more past covers before we catch up to modern day, so we're making progress towards how I do things now and can finally compare things to the past. So, I guess we'll see what happens then.

Other Statistics