33 1/3 - Koji Kondo's Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack

Koji Kondo s Super Mario Bros. (1985) score redefined video game music. With under three minutes of music, Kondo put to rest an era of bleeps and bloops the sterile products of a lab environment replacing it with one in which game sounds constituted a legitimate form of artistic expression. Andrew Schartmann takes us through the various external factors (e.g., the video game crash of 1983, Nintendo s marketing tactics) that coalesced into a ripe environment in which Kondo s musical experiments could thrive. He then delves into the music itself, searching for reasons why our hearts still dance to the primitive 8-bit tunes of a bygone era.

What musical features are responsible for Kondo s distinct Mario sound ? How do the different themes underscore the vastness of Princess Peach s Mushroom Kingdom? And in what ways do the game s sound effects resonate with our physical experience of the world? These and other questions are explored within, through the lens of Kondo s compositional philosophy one that would influence an entire generation of video game composers. As Kondo himself stated, we [at Nintendo] were trying to do something that had never been done before. In this book, Schartmann shows his readers how Kondo and his team not just succeeded, but heralded in a new era of video games.