Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [27]
One of the biggest changes was the background: every previous Mario game had had a black background, the better to make the colors more vibrant. Most all games followed this rule. But Super Mario Bros. (the game was given a superlative adjective) took place on a beautiful bright day, with a Montana-worthy horizon of periwinkle sky. A few scattered clouds and distant mountains (the clouds and the bushes were, in fact, the same fluffy image colored white or green) made for a feeling of scope, that this two-dimensional land truly existed. It was, in a word, happy.
Happy was a guiding light for the project. Difficulty was a doubleedged sword for any game: too easy and there’s no replay challenge, too hard and you repel players. How to keep people playing regardless of what was happening? Keep ’em smiling. Therefore, the villains were cute mushroom “Goombas” toddling around on stubby legs, Venus’s flytrap “Pirhana plants” with luscious rep lips, and white squid “Bloopers” that resembled curious bells.
The music, most of all, was happy. The score for level 1 (or, to use the game’s nomenclature, World 1-1) is an infectiously happy synthesizer salsa. When Mario has an underground level, a bass-heavy score fraught with tension kicks in. When he’s underwater, the music is soothing and muted, almost submerged. And when Mario grabs a power-up star, the beat turns as fast and frantic as anything this side of Beethoven’s Ninth played at 33-1/3 speed.
This was all the work of Kōji Kondō, the new hire. Kondō had a limited palette of sounds to work with. Forget writing for piano: he had two monophonic channels, a synthesized triangle wave, and a white-noise generator. Try to write good music with a hearing tone, a wooden block, and two chanting monks as your “band.” It was possible, of course, but it would first require writing a synthesizer program that could turn sine waves into piano licks.
Sneaking into the Famicon’s source code led Kondō to discover an extra sound channel: a pulse-code modulation channel designated for sound effects. And those two monophonic channels could be used together to create harmonies. He set up the white-noise generator as percussion, with the triangle wave working as a bass. Drums, bass, chords: the band was starting to come together, all inside a computer chip. He passed on what he had discovered to others, penning the section in the computer-language cartridge Famicon BASIC on sound programming.
Some things couldn’t be taught, though: they needed trial and error. Kondō didn’t write just one theme to Super Mario Bros., he wrote lots. Each one he played over footage of gaming sessions, and kept in a loop in his head. Was the score fast enough? Was it too fast? Did it contrast with the sound effects he had for the actions: the sproing of a jump, the smack of an enemy’s hit? Did a section go on for too long before repeating, or not long enough? He grew satisfied with the underground music, the battle music for bosses, and the underwater music. But not the main theme.
Eventually, Kondō perfected his little score. The secret was to write multiple minisongs, each a few seconds long, and string them together. They were a series of pop hooks destined to worm their way into the world’s auditory canals. When played in a row, they somehow never sounded like one song on repeat. They even sped up in tempo as Mario’s time ran out. The song’s lyrics and title, “Go Go Mario,” are awkward and probably best forgotten. The first two bars: “Today, full of energy, Mario is still running, running / Go save Princess Peach! Go!” But the melody is unimprovable.
If this hadn’t been a Nintendo game, it might have ended with World 1-4, or World 2-4. Both times Mario defeats a large adversary, a “boss.” A princess comes out at the end of each fight, and