“Louis, this is music!” – a remaster of the soundtrack of the legendary platformer from the 90s has been published

It’s about SMWpublished thirty years ago and needs no introduction. Specialized experts and publications continue to include it in the tops of video games of all time, and enthusiasts are happy to take on the “restoration” rethinking of the musical design.

Photo: Joao Tzanno.  Source: Unsplash.com
Photo: Joao Tzanno. Source: Unsplash.com

A minute of history

Original OST wrote Koji Kondo, a Japanese composer who participated in the preparation of dozens of games and musical themes, including “Ground Theme“- the longest and most famous of the original versions platformer in 1985. SMW came out only five years later, but its game world was more complex, which means it required more advanced music.

Kondo wrote the main theme and several variations, differing in tone and tempo. He chose in F major for standard locations, in F minor for castles. I conveyed the atmosphere of underground and underwater levels with the help of filters and raised the tempo of melodies for air and forest settings to give the gameplay additional dynamics and poignancy.

SMW presented with the prefix SNESwhich possessed an advanced and standalone audio system. It was built on the basis of SONY SPC700 with built-in “RAM”, where the main SNES processor transferred the player program and samples.

Further into business entered DSP processor that generated a 16-bit signal.

Photo: Ravi Palwe.  Source: Unsplash.com
Photo: Ravi Palwe. Source: Unsplash.com

The system expanded the possibilities for creativity, which Kondo took advantage of. However, the restrictions were still significant and he wrote the soundtrack for about a year and a half.

What a remaster there is

A group of enthusiasts took up the restoration of the game edition and by coincidence were able to use the original samples without compression, which some time ago “leaked” to the network along with the source code of a number of other cult games of the 90s, including various SMW spin-offs for others platforms. The final remaster of the music theme the other day published on the YT channel The Brickster. About release wrote The Verge and other media.

According to the initiators of the project, they plan to continue to remaster the music from this and other games. Interestingly, as time went on, the material only became more, so they conduct the process quite openly – discuss his and the results of his work in social networks.

By the way, in the playlist of the soundtrack SMW published quite an interesting comparison with samples from Lego Island 1997 release – the first video game of this series for Windows.

Hot topic

Remastering of game compositions, and making replicas of an audio iron is a popular hobby of many enthusiasts from different parts of the world. In the comments to the post about SMW on The Verge, they immediately recalled StarBender channel and gave as an example one of the topics to Super Mario 64. Last year they talked in detail about how music works in the NES on Habré, and we also shared materials about reverse engineering and replicas of cards like Sound Blaster 1.0.

We will continue to observe interesting innovations in this area, but for now, we have prepared a couple of materials for you for additional study on the topic:


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