The Original Super Mario Bros. Theme Song is a work of genius.

1 year ago
14

The music of Super Mario was composed by Koji Kondo for the Nintendo console game released in 1985. The famous Mario song is called “Ground Theme.” It is quite remarkable because it contains only 24 seconds of original material despite it being 88 seconds long. How that is possible is Kondo is reusing snippets in different orders which creates variety. This is important because people can play hours of Mario and you do not want gamers to go crazy. The song is both simple and complex.
The music was produced for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System console which could only produce three notes at a time. The console had limited computing power and data storage. Kondo formed a C-major chord with notes over more than a single octave to achieve richer sounds.
Nintendo forced Kondo to study assembly language because he would be important in game design. Also, he would need to know how to compress data in a way that did not compress sound. Koji Kondo became part composer, part coder. He would go on to play a key role in the development of Mario games at Nintendo.
Works Cited:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/super-mario-bros-music-koji-kondo-a74ce7d9?mod=hp_listb_pos1

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