Fans used the amazing Nintendo ‘gigaleak’ to restore the soundtrack of Super Mario World.
Nintendo’s 2020 gigaleak, which reveals prototypes striking for Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Kart, Star Fox 2 and more, also contains the source code for Super Mario Advance – a game that features monsters from the SNES classic Super Mario World 1990 reuse.
Twitter user The Brickster found proper names for many instruments in Super Mario World, which helped other marbles find the source for the monsters.
With the discovery of the source samples, the restoration of Koji Kondo’s iconic 30-year-old music began. The friends of the Brickster recreate the tracks compressed to work on the SNES using the original, lossless synths.
For anyone who is curious about how these findings were made, it is actually simple. Do you know how the Gigaleak had source code for Super Mario Advanced? This game uses monsters from Super Mario World. These monsters had names we did not have, and that was how we could find them. pic.twitter.com/qWFTG1YdYW
– The Brickster (@lebrickster) 3 February 2021
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The restored Super Mario World OST is available on The Brickster’s YouTube channel. Here is an excerpt:
The restored music may give an indication of how Kondo’s music would have sounded if it had not been limited by the SNES hardware. However, some have said that the restored music sounds worse than the original lo-fi music on which it is based, with too much reverberation.
The Brickster addressed this criticism on Twitter, saying the recovery is a what if? exercise done for fun.
“… I see where you’re coming from,” The Brickster said. “Truly, these tracks are probably not designed with the full spots in mind. They’s just things we do for fun, as a ‘what if’ thing.”
What if Kondo is not limited to the small sound ram size, and he can make full use of the sounds? Of course, we’ll never know if he did, since no demo versions of tracks for Super Mario World have ever been officially released, but I think it would be similar to such tracks. 2/2
– The Brickster (@lebrickster) 5 February 2021
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Work is underway. Who knows what the Nintendo gigaleak will lead next?