Fans used Nintendo’s big “gigaleak” to restore the Super Mario World soundtrack.
Nintendo’s 2020 gigaleak, which revealed revealing prototypes for Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Kart, Star Fox 2 and more, also contained the source code for Super Mario Advance – a game that reuses samples of the SNES classic 1990 Super Mario World .
Twitter user The Brickster found proper names for many instruments in Super Mario World, which helped other experts find the source of these samples.
With the original samples discovered, the work of restoring Koji Kondo’s iconic 30-year-old music began. Brickster’s friends recreated the tracks that were compressed to work on SNES using the original lossless synthesizers.
For anyone curious about how these discoveries were made, it’s actually quite simple. Do you know how Gigaleak had source code for Super Mario Advanced? This game reuses samples from Super Mario World. These samples had names that we didn’t have, and that’s how we found them. pic.twitter.com/qWFTG1YdYW
– The Brickster (@lebrickster) February 3, 2021
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The restored Super Mario World OST is on The Brickster’s YouTube channel. Here is a snippet:
The restored music provides an indication, perhaps, of how Kondo’s music would have sounded had it not been restricted by SNES hardware. However, some have said that the restored music sounds worse than the original lo-fi music they were based on, with a lot of reverberation.
Brickster addressed this criticism on Twitter, saying the restoration is a what if? exercise made for fun.
“… I see where you’re coming from,” said Brickster. “Honestly, these tracks probably weren’t designed with the full patches in mind. These are just things we’re doing for fun, like ‘what if’.”
What if Kondo wasn’t limited to the small size of the sound ram, and he could use the sounds to the fullest? We may never know if he did that, of course, since no demo versions of the Super Mario World tracks have been officially released, but I think those would be similar to those tracks. 2/2
– The Brickster (@lebrickster) February 5, 2021
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The work is in progress. Who knows what Nintendo’s gigaleak will take next?