The music in the SNES game Super Mario World uses heavily compressed samples to fit the hardware restrictions of the early 1990s. Fans who explored the Nintendo leak managed to discover the sample libraries that composer Koji Kondo used and “restore” the soundtrack as it sounded on the hardware with which he probably created it.
A video game music researcher who works for The Brickster told Polygon over Discord that he first found the names of the original sound samples on the Nintendo gigaleak. After that, he and a team of friends found out which instruments were used to create the soundtrack, using the file names and also researched which instruments the composer Koji Kondo used at the time.
“For example, a sound was called ‘fantasy’ in the source files,” said The Brickster. “Knowing what I knew about Kondo’s setup during the time of Mario World, I deduced that this must mean the ‘Fantasia’ patch on the Roland D-550, a synthesizer he owned at the time. “
It is magical to hear that, like stepping out of an audio plain into three dimensions.
But it’s also a little strange: the song went from something that sounded rich in the context of a game console to something that sounded simple, even minimalist, in the context of music production.
Here is something to consider. Just like old pixel art was often designed with blurry CRT monitors and dark gamma curves in mind …
… Old game music was intentionally produced for (and mastered using) the target systems. Compression artifacts, downconverting samples and the undefined ‘color’ of old chips all introduce new qualities to the sounds that were anticipated and expected.
A crude but simple illustration: if you are old enough to have been in the arcades in 1985, the Sega theme Hang on it probably sounds weaker than you remember. That’s because the speakers in the cabinets were quite confusing, softening the music and adding a bass boost. It was probably produced with these speakers in mind. Running the Hang On Theme bitwise data from an emulator to a FLAC file does not recover lost perfection, it encounters a headache.
Insofar as Super Mario WorldWas the instrumentation’s simply compressed in post-production to fit this little guy, or was it intentionally designed for that, maybe it’s an issue for Kondo?