When I was a kid I played a lot, and I mean a lot, of Super Mario Bros. My grandpa once asked me to explain the game to him after he’d watched me play it for the nine thousandth hour. I tried hard and couldn’t do it. There’s a lot that defies intuition. Like how you can jump many times your height, as if you’re a bug.
I also had problems explaining the hovering blocks dispensing magic mushrooms and giant flowers that give you the ability to throw fireballs.
Nintendo games use most of the same basic gameplay elements as American games, but the narrative context is wildly different. Their games are full of life-and-death combat, but they don’t take place in postapocalyptic hellscapes. Mario has his adventures in manicured, meticulously tidy gardens. The perfectly symmetrical, geometric shrubbery and landscaping is inspired by the zen gardens and temples in Miyamoto’s native Kyoto.
The idea of a vengeful turtle god and his armies of mushrooms, insects and carnivorous plants seems insane from an American perspective, but they’re all standard folk archetypes in Japan, the way we loosely base all of our video games on the Bible.
Mario isn’t entirely a brute force game. You can’t defeat the vengeful turtle god in hand-to-hand combat. You have to be crafty, use evasion and timing.
Super Mario Bros was designed for the arcade. When Nintendo ported it to their new cartridge format, they just commented out the lines of code about having to insert coins. Out of mercy to repeat players, Miyamoto included some hidden shortcuts called warp zones.
The warp zones give Super Mario Bros its peculiar topography.
Super Mario Bros is an infinite loop. Your “reward” for beating the game is to be deposited back at the beginning of the first level to slog your way through again. The bottom of the diagram shows the result of a bug in the code that leads to a closed infinite loop nicknamed the minus world.
Kōji Kondō wrote the music in SMB. He’s best known for the calypso-flavored main theme song, which must be one of the most frequently-heard melodies in the world at this point. I think his best work is in the dungeon levels.
The good people at 4 Color Rebellion put all the Super Mario Bros sounds up on the internet for our listening, sampling and remixing pleasure. The music and sound effects in Mario are produced on on a microchip studded with electronic oscillators inside the NES. The sound chip sends electrical signals to the TV speakers.
Audio geeks may wish to know what this sound chip was equipped with:
Two square wave generators with variable volume and hardware pitch bending.
One triangle wave generator, with a fixed volume, for rounder, bassier sounds.
One white noise channel for percussion.
One more sophisticated channel that can play a lower-resolution version of the audio on a CD, kind of a “line in” for short digital samples stored in the game software. Used for speech and other waveforms too mathematically involved for the other oscillators.
Kōji Kondō wrote a score showing the timbres, pitches, rhythms, and articulations. Somebody translated this score into assembly language, probably with the assistance of some in-house custom computer program written for that purpose.
Now there’s a whole genre of hipster music devoted to this sound card and other retro eighties hardware called chiptunes. You don’t need to write out your scores in assembly language anymore, but microchips are still not the most intuitive musical instruments to play. I prefer to have a lot of layers of software in between me and the oscillators in my Mbox 2.
Hear my remix of the World 1-2 music.
Pipe World instrumental
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Me vs Kōji Kondō vs James Brown vs Alex Torovic
Tags: autobio, chiptunes, cold tech hot beats, computers, eighties, electricity, electronica, microchips, nintendo, super mario bros, video games
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