Get Equipped With Music Reviews!

An overdone overview of the soundtracks to two iconic gaming franchises

Today’s post is brought to you by my good friend, Alexander Hellene! I highly recommend his excellent Substack, his sweet science-fiction trilogy (I’m not even a big sci-fi guy, and I really enjoyed the Swordbringer series), or his music reviews. He’s a true Renaissance man, and most importantly to this Substack, a lover of fine vintage video games. I couldn’t be happier to feature his work on the Sonoran Videogame Society.

Ladies and gentlemen… Alexander Hellene.

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Sonoran Videogame Society is a Substack dedicated to playing and exploring video games with friends like you. Some posts are free, some are for paid subscribers only. Don’t forget to sign up here. Thanks for reading!

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Introduction

At first, there was nothing . . . and then beeps and bloops . . . followed by (drum roll, please) MUSIC!

Nah, we won’t get actual drums in the games for a few years, but you know what I mean.

Taito’s Space Invaders (1978) is considered to be the first video game with continuous background music. Before that, gamers played in silence, like the cold vacuum of space . . . or their living room. Since the waning days of the Carter administration, video game music has become an inseparable part of the whole gaming package, truly coming to fruition as an artform with everybody’s favorite gray box, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Released in 1985, and widely credited with single-handedly saving the flailing home video game industry, the NES also revolutionized game music.

The touchstone, obviously, the ur-example of VG OSTs, is Koji Kondo’s outstanding work on Super Mario Bros.—I guarantee the main theme just popped into your head right now. Though released in 1985, the music in this game, notably the main theme and the underground theme, are still utilized in current-gen Mario games nearly 40 years later. If that isn’t staying power, I don’t know what is.

Koji Kondo

More legendary game soundtracks followed suit, some by Kondo (Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda), and some by composers from other companies, like Hidenori Maezawa and Kiyohiro Sada’s work on Konami’s Contra, Koichi Sugiyama on Enix’s (later Square Enix) Dragon Quest games, Nobuo Uematsu on Square’s Final Fantasy franchise, and into the 16-bit eras and beyond. The Follin brothers (Tim, Geoff, and Mike), David Wise, Yuzo Koshiro, Yoko Shimomura, Yasunori Mitsuda, Michiru Yamane, Junichi Masuda, Hirokazu Tanaka, Masato Nakamura . . . these names are likely familiar to fans of what are now called “retro games.” And for good. reason: their works have become lodged in the brains of players, becoming as inseparable from the experience as the gameplay itself.

Video game composers had an interesting challenge in the early days, needing to create pieces for games on systems with acute hardware limitations that would not only not get on players’ nerves, but be memorable and catchy and, most importantly, fit and enhance the mood of the game. And said composers couldn’t use the talents of a full orchestra, or even a string quartet, rock group, or jazz combo. They had to rely on the sound hardware of whatever system they were writing for, and their own prodigious talents.

Video game music had to be music distilled to its core components with few, if any, tricks to hide behind. Melodies had to be well-constructed and able to loop back on themselves naturally. The harmonies and rhythms had to be interesting and ear-catching without becoming droning. The goal wasn’t to have players tune it out, but to associate the music as an integral part of the game, just like with movies. And by and large these pioneers of the artform did a bang-up job.

You’ll notice two notable NES franchises hitherto absent from this discussion: Mega Man and Castlevania. That’s because these two venerable gaming series are the subject of this series of posts that Dylan Cornelius is so kind to host on his site. Both are two of my favorites both for gameplay and musical reasons.

Who Am I?

What makes me qualified to write about this stuff? In addition to my day job, among my interests, and something I’ve been formally trained in, is music.¹ From performing to studying to writing and to listening, I've been at it for almost 30 years (rock, pop, jazz, classical, punk, metal, lots of weird stuff, the works). I’ve also been playing these old games for longer than that, so I am familiar with them. Thanks to Dylan for letting me talk about the music from these games! I hope you all enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them.

The Games

I’m reasonably certain this is a bootleg collection, but this is every game we’ll be doing.

We will be doing reviews of the soundtracks to the following games:

• Mega Man

• Mega Man II

• Mega Man III

• Mega Man IV

• Mega Man V

• Mega Man VI

• Castlevania

• Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest

• Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse

These are all on the NES. Note that Mega Man would continue on the SNES and PlayStation, all the way up to modern consoles in addition to innumerable spin-offs, while Castlevania would similarly continue on to the SNES, Genesis, and PlayStation and PlayStation 2, before finding a home on Nintendo's various handhelds, notably the Game Boy Advance, the DS, and the 3DS. I might cover those later, but for know these nine games will keep me plenty busy.

The Hardware

The Ricoh RP2A03

The NES contained a Ricoh 2A03 or RP 2A03. This was an 8-bit microprocessor, but was also used as a sound chip. Not bad! According to Wikipedia, the 2A703 has 5 channels separated into two APUs. I don’t know what that particular Simpsons character has to do with any of this, but—

Oh, APU stands for Audio Processing Unit. Further:

While a majority of the NES library uses only 4 channels, later games use the 5th DPCM channel due to cartridge memory expansions becoming cheaper. For example, Super Mario Bros. 3 uses the DPCM channel for simple drum sounds, while Journey to Silius uses it for sampled basslines.

Parsing the-technical language, for our purposes it’s enough to know that NES composers typically had four channels to work with. In the Mega Man and Castlevania games, this usually results in two “lead’ channels—the higher-pitched melody and harmony lines that could be likened to guitars or keyboards—a “bass” channel, and a “miscellaneous” channel that often gets used for percussion. Note, however, that when some games want to do a tom-tom effect with the drums, in addition to a bass-drum/snare-drum beat, that tom-tom “eats” one of the other channels, i.e., actually uses it, most notably the bass channel, so you often have the bassline cut out at that point. Keep an ear out for that as you listen to the discussed soundtracks.

The Process

Each substantial piece of music will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10 with decimals used to allow us to get to the nitty gritty. Roughly, 5 is mediocre—shut it or not, no strong feelings either way—with anything below that being absolutely mute-worthy to varying degrees. A 6 is middle-of-the-road, with the 7-8 range being pretty good but flawed, and 8 and higher going from “recommended” to “excellent” to “iconic/legendary” The scores for each piece in a given game will then be added together and averaged out to get our overall soundtrack score.

Since we're starting with the Mega Man series, here are the Categories:

• Main title theme (if applicable)

• Password theme (if applicable)

• Stage select

• Stage select confirmation jingle

• Each robot master theme

• Boss fight theme

• New weapon theme (if applicable)

• Wily castle theme (if applicable)

• Wily level themes

• Wily stage boss themes

• Final boss theme (if applicable)

• Ending theme

In addition to discussing the more technical aspects of a given piece of music, and overall just how good it is, we’ll also be taking the feel into consideration, how well a them fits its stage or other situation.

I think this sets us up for our first review, the original 1987 Mega Man, with music courtesy of Manami Matsumae. See you next post.

1. I also write: check out my books here.