Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [83]
Mario shows up in harmonious form again and again: most recently in 2010’s Super Claudio Bros. parody musical in Washington, D.C. Nintendo always delivered great music for Mario’s games, from Miyamoto’s Donkey Kong ditties to Kōji Kondō’s hummable theme songs. These have been regularly released, both as music-from-thevideo-game albums and remixed in the 1993 Super Mario Compact Disco album, whose title is the best thing about it. (The teen R&B singer Mario Barrett, who’s billed as just “Mario,” isn’t connected to Nintendo.)
Mario pops up often in the variously branded gamer-friend subsets of music known as nerdcore (geek-referencing hip-hip), geek rock, and marching band music, which often uses disposable pop ditties (TV theme songs, ad jingles) to draw a reaction from a halftime crowd. The University of Maryland at College Park even has a hundred-strong Gamer Symphony Orchestra. The 14-Year-Old Girls—who have songs like “Castlevania Punk,” “Run Lolo Run,” and “1-800-255-3700” (Nintendo’s customer service number)—depict themselves as the rocking cast of Super Mario Bros. 2 on the cover of their album Zombies In, Robots Out. Another band calls itself the Minibosses, and has a song called “Super Mario Bros. 2.” Rapper Benefit, in the song “Super Mario Bros.,” starts off his reimagining of the game plot with “It’s 1986 I’m in the first grade / I’m workin’ really hard to get Mario laid.” Other Mario-named bands include the Lost Levels, Stage 3-1, and Tanooki Rebirth.
It’s not a recent trend. In the early nineties, reggae singer Shinehead recorded “The World of the Video Game,” sampling the Super Mario Bros. music. Nintendo capitalized on the love of Kondō’s music, via Super Mario Bros. sheet music and even a Mario & Yoshi Music Center synthesizer. Perhaps some of these modern musicians got their start via Mario. Or maybe musicians and gamers have a rebellious connection. “Video games are bad for you?” a well-known Miyamoto quote goes. “That what they said about rock and roll.”
MIYAMOTO’S WORK ON THE GAMECUBE WAS AKIN TO A political aide in the last days of a failing campaign. He flew around the world to talk up the Gamecube hardware, software, and pipeline. He challenged his team of designers to explore territory they never thought they’d encounter as Nintendo employees. He took Mario places he’d never been before. All in a futile rush to keep the eversinking balloon of Nintendo’s PR campaign up in the air, one mad swipe at a time.
It had all started a few years ago, with Conker. Conker was a cute squirrel designed by Rare, who made his first appearance in 1997’s Diddy Kong Racing. (His name comes from a British game of swinging horse chestnuts at each other, to smash them open.) He got his own Game Boy Color game, Conker’s Pocket Tales, two years later. Work began on a N64 game for a 2001 release, one of Nintendo’s final offerings before switching gears to the Gamecube.
What was eventually released as Conker’s Bad Fur Day goes up there with Super KKK Bros. for video-game infamy. In one puzzle, Conker reaches a switch by filling up a huge vault with cow diarrhea and swimming through it. He jumps to a hard-to-access area by bouncing on a female character’s enormous breasts. Characters curse, and they’re English so they curse well. The evil teddy bear characters are Nazis, and explode into stuffing when shot. One character is a talking pile of dung. Conker can urinate on others for extra damage, one of his powers when drunk. The game opens with a tribute to A Clockwork Orange.
Unlike most other infamous games, Conker’s Bad Fur Day was also amazingly good. Technically, it was the N64’s flat-out best game. The designers were inspired by South Park, a show that could play on the disgust of viewers the way Yo-Yo Ma could bow a cello. There were vast rolling hills of lip-synched dialogue, great textures, and no load times. It was a spitball thrown at the blackboard by Randy Johnson. Rare had gone the offensive route so the game wouldn’t be lost in the crowd of fuzzy-animal