Game:

Super Smash Bros. (1999)

Duration: 2:13

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31

Taking the maxim you are what you eat to the extreme, the Sanrio-like puffy, cute, pink...thing known as Kirby is the pampered child of the Super Smash Bros series, being also created by the fighting series director Masahiro Sakurai for the Game Boy and developed by HAL Laboratory. Throughout most of his adventures Kirby journeys across Dream Land, a fictional country on the distant Planet Popstar, to protect it from alien invaders and other threats to his home.

In development, Kirby's design was originally intended to be a mere placeholder for the Player Character. However, Sakurai grew attached to the Waddling Head, and decided to stray from the plan and keep him as the protagonist. He was initially known as Popopo, the star of Twinkle Popo, but this was wisely rechristened from a list of name candidates. It helped that the lawyer who defended Nintendo in an important lawsuit from Universal involving Donkey Kong was named John Kirby.

Hirokazu Ando, the composer of the first Super Smash Bros game is also very familiar with Kirby seeing that he personally composed many of the games from the franchise; however, one of his own compositions was not selected to represent the Kirby series in this fighting title. Instead, we get what was at the time a rather obscure track from original series' composer Jun Ishikawa, an inhouse composer from HAL. The frantic pace of the music that accompanied a mini-game included in the SNES game Kirby Super Star, Gourmet Race, fit perfectly the tone of the Super Smash Series and went on to become one of the staples of both series, becoming the most recognizable piece to come off the Kirby franchise without being remotely close to being the main theme, unlike the other characters represented in the game which have their series' iconic theme as their stage background music.

The theme uses the infectious fast oom-pah rhythms reminiscent of Russian folk music to set the chaotic tone alongside a simple harmony in the C minor tonality, which then goes on to the relative Eb major tonality. It sticks close to the original arrangement from the SNES game, not adding the characteristic extended harmony that plagues other Smash 64 tunes. It mainly focuses on a i to iv progression after an descending intro of Fm - Gm - Ab - G. It uses sparingly the VII chord to finish the phrases. The composition is all about the melody, instrumentation and jumping rhythms. When it goes to the relative major it focuses on the famous Pachelbel's Canon chord progression, ending with a sus chord in order to loop, just like the Lost Woods theme from Ocarina of Tima.

Here you can hear the "instrumental"version followed by the melodic one.


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This is a music theory analysis and piano cover visualization project recreated with the original instrument tracks from the Nintendo 64 game. Extracted with a specialized audio software, we can now dig inside the score for the first time; offering us a glimpse for how each instrument contributes to the whole.

#supersmashbros #kirby #nintendo

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