The music in the SNES game Super Mario World use strongly compressed samples to fit into the constraints of the hardware of the early nineties. Fans investigating the Nintendo leak were able to find the sample libraries used by composer Koji Kondo, and repair the “soundtrack” as it sounds on the hardware with which he allegedly created it.
A researcher on video games passing by The Brickster told Polygon on Discord that he first found the names of the original sound samples in the Nintendo Gigaleak. Afterwards, he and a team of friends determined what instruments were used to create the soundtrack, using the file name as well as research on what instruments the composer, Koji Kondo, used at the time.
“One sound, for example, was called ‘fantasy’ in the source files,” The Brickster said. ‘Know what I know about Kondo’s setup during the time of Mario World, I deduced that it must mean the ‘Fantasia’ patch of the Roland D-550, a synth he owned at the time. ‘
It’s magical to hear it, like stepping out of a land of sound in three dimensions.
But it’s also a little strange: the music went from something that sounded rich in the context of a game console to something that sounded simple, even minimalist, in the context of production music.
Here’s something to consider. Just as old pixel art was often drawn with vague CRT displays and shady gamma curves in mind …
… old game music was deliberately produced for (and mastered using) the target systems. Compression artifacts, downward conversion of samples, and the indefinite ‘color’ of old chips all add new features to sounds that are expected and expected.
A crude but simple illustration: if you’re old enough to have been in arcades in 1985, the theme of Sega’s is Hang on probably sounds smaller than you remember. This is because the speakers in the cabinets were very surprised, which softened the music and gave a bass boost. It was probably manufactured with the speakers in mind. The management of the Hang On Theme’s data piece by piece from an emulator to a FLAC file does not recover lost perfection, it finds headaches.
The extent to which Super Mario WorldThe instrumentation was simply cut after production to fit on this little fella, or deliberately designed for it, is that perhaps a question for Kondo?