The Melodies I Never Chose to Memorize
Somewhere in the back of my skull, completely uninvited, the overworld theme from Super Mario World starts up. While I’m making coffee, while I’m on the subway, while I’m standing in a supermarket aisle deciding between two nearly identical pasta sauces. I didn’t choose to store this. It stored itself.
Video game music has occupied more real estate in my head than anything else I’ve ever listened to, and I’ve made my peace with that. My old iPod had entire folders dedicated to remixed Chrono Trigger arrangements, fan orchestrations of Final Fantasy XIII, and at least three different versions of Koji Kondo’s Ocarina of Time score. The title sequences from Grandia, Illusion of Time, Terranigma—I could hum them right now in full fidelity without trying. They got in during childhood, before I had opinions about music, and they never left. No band, no album, nothing in any genre has had that kind of access to my brain, because none of them had ten-year-old me as a captive audience for two hundred hours.
Red Bull Music put together a documentary series called Diggin’ In The Carts that goes to Japan to sit with the people who actually wrote this music—composers like Hidenori Maezawa and Masashi Kageyama, whose names most people couldn’t place but whose themes anyone who touched a Famicom or Super Nintendo can whistle back without prompting. It’s a surprisingly good piece of work for something produced under a brand banner. They take the subject seriously, let the composers speak at length, and resist the urge to flatten everything into a nostalgia reel.
What’s always fascinated me about this era of composition is what the hardware constraints did to the craft. Three or four sound channels, brutal memory limits, and composers still had to write music that players would be willing to hear looping indefinitely—sometimes for hours—without losing their minds. That’s an insane brief. The results hold up not in spite of the constraints but somehow because of them. Yasunori Mitsuda’s work on Chrono Trigger, Nobuo Uematsu across a decade of Final Fantasy, Yoko Shimomura’s early output—the density had nowhere to go but inward, and it shows. Thirty years later it’s still rattling around in my head uninvited, and I can’t even be annoyed about it.