Ico (2001) requires nothing less than complete investment in its construction. Every crumbling stone and rusty lever serves to reinforce an exacting and authoritative design, as staged and artificial as the huge obtrusive castle that serves as the only environment. The game remains strangely ironic in this way, exhibiting a realism and artistry that’s twice or maybe even three times removed from prominent troubles on the receptive level: the controls are unintuitive, in-game cameras are stubbornly restrictive and refuse to comply with direction, and bloom lighting frequently threatens monotony, casting everything in a hazy glow that makes one squint and strain unnaturally.
Fine. As a game—as an interactive apparatus—it’s not perfect.
But behind Team Ico and Fumito Ueda’s unnerving design lies moments so inescapably beautiful and human that to call Ico anything less than moving is missing something entirely, something important. Yorda (the NPC that the player, as young protagonist Ico, must lead through the massive fortress labyrinth) curiously checks her elbow often when left idle. Perhaps it’s to knead the arm that Ico must constantly tug on, ushering the both of them through gameplay sequences of puzzle solving and light combat that would be brisk enough in the first place. Or it could simply be fatigue—after all, stress manifests itself in many forms and, without spoiling the story, to say that the adolescent Yorda is worried about sneaking out without Mom’s permission is quite an understatement. Later, when freedom seems all but spread out before the pair, Yorda is so physically and emotionally drained that she can barely stand on her own two feet, and stumbles when Ico tries to drag her with the same aggressive urgency that he (the player) has used before.
Many people cite the bridge sequence, the false endgame, as the crux of Ueda’s authorship, the “moment” in which the game crosses over from simplistic platformer to emblematic beacon of art, but the true measure of Ico’s brilliance comes from everything that came before: Ico’s half-lanky and awkward stride as he struggles to carry a bomb (clearly biting off more than he can chew but masking the struggle behind not-quite-realized machismo); the small controller vibrations set off when Ico and Yorda’s grip snaps taut; and Yorda, when given a moment to herself, quietly examines her elbow, and humanity’s small intricacies become stylized revelations of themselves, lasting far beyond their intention.
The apparatus of Ico is flawed, to be sure, but at the same time, how alive the diffraction is!
We are now officially done with one-third of our summer, and I couldn’t be feeling more pressure with regards to the videogames that I’m currently playing. It’s not like the old days: Summer slammed into our soft impressionable minds like a freight train of liberation, and the possible configurations of doing everything but anything stretched on for subjective eternities. Videogames were a part of my everyday playscape, as it was for a lot of people, and while the leisure-ness of games also lent itself a little guilt during the school year, summer meant we were free to spent hours and hours—days if some of us wanted to—tackling a game (or two, or twenty) without fear of any harsh parental scoldings other than the occasional “go outside” mantra and, frankly, I was totally fine with that. It all fused together into a tapestry of seasonal freedom and I could shift activity gears seamlessly. The games would always be there, after all, and time was simply a measure of sunlight, not scheduled events.
It’s different now. This is something every gamer realizes when they reach their 20s: our calendars condense closer and closer together (”the circle is closing in,” I think the old saying goes) and free time becomes a commodity as precious as a gemstone. Nothing will bring those carefree days of childhood back. Coincidentally, the gaming industry seems aware of this as much as we do, and exploits our nostalgia to nefarious ends: “Retro” releases tantalize with the possibility of re-living our pre-pubescent periods, and franchise reboots claim to strip a game down to its core appeal, to its “roots,” brewing the feelings we once felt when we first laid eyes on them. The industry didn’t simply abandon our demographic when we aged out; it followed us because we are STILL the demographic, and are doing everything imaginable to persuade us to purchase new merchandise by disguising it as the old. And, for the most part, it’s working.
Yet old habits die hard, and I have a particular summer gaming tradition that I’m currently agonizing over, which is to play a Zelda game from front to back. I’ve been doing it on and off for the better part of twelve years, and while last season was Zelda barren as I tried to settle into a new full time job, this year I plan to ritualistically dive in head first, which is exactly where my conundrum lies. But first things first: why this particular tradition?
Zelda games, to me, exclusively have the summer vibe going on more than any other. One can indirectly channel the feelings that creator Shigeru Miyamoto must have experienced as a youth during his own adventures in the forests and caves around his hometown of Kyoto, the inspiration for the Hyrule universe. The essence of Zelda has remained resolutely intact all of these years, and no matter how ridiculous and off-center the series may spin (for example, Link shredding on a cog), one aspect of gameplay is delightfully ever-present: environmental exploration, the timeless techniques of turning over every rock, bombing every crack and poking through every bush while searching for all manner of hidden treasure, finding your way around more by memory and natural landmarks than by map. Of course, Zelda games do have maps—considering some of the trickier 3-D temples, it would be ridiculous if they didn’t—but do you honestly use them more than sight alone?
Another important and quintessentially summer-like staple of Zelda games is that more than half of Link’s time in Hyrule is spent outdoors, dwarfed by his natural surroundings and forcing the player to simply take a moment and assess their rightful place within that world. Every time you enter a town or dungeon or acreage of land that hasn’t been revealed before, a short panoramic cinema offers a quick geographic survey that both invites and overwhelms, a travelogue of epic proportions, the ultimate vacation. The inevitable warping takes much of the tedium out of travel, but at the start of these games, all that legwork is actually useful in getting a sense of the scope of the Zelda universe, a scope that, with the later 3-D iterations, spans time as well as space. The sheer pleasure of living in Hyrule for dozens of hours isn’t just from Link’s satisfying workout on that gentle Nintendo treadmill—starting as frail and all but written-off forest waif and ultimately arriving at nearly indestructible master swordsman—but from taking part in a narrative that encompasses an entire ecosystem, in which a reward can stem from merely watching that Hyrulian sun rise and set many, many times, a constant in a game constructed around a remarkable transformation. Link’s adventures encompass summer, to be sure, and not just any summer, but ones that we always remember as occurring long ago: fresh, exciting, and endless.
What’s vexing me isn’t the issue of whether or not to play through a Zelda game: considering the unusually cool and damp June that the East Coast has gone through, it’s high time for some sun and adrenaline. The question, rather, is WHICH game to play? I held off on finishing Twilight Princess because I purchased it with my Wii in January ‘07 and, snowboarding section or not, it just didn’t feel right to be playing it in the winter. I wouldn’t mind revisiting Wind Waker again, and Majora’s Mask recently made its way onto Virtual Console (never mind that the game is a masterpiece of dread; that’s a topic for another article). Oh, and the handheld games! I can actually play those outside, in the open air, maybe sitting on a park bench or walking The Ramble. What a Mobius strip that would be! I have been meaning to play through Link’s Awakening again after being swaddled in fuzzy Game Boy memories this year. Or maybe Ocarina of Time? Or A Link to the Past? Or The Adventure of Link? Argh!
Now that there are only a little less than two months left, time is running out for my Summer Zelda playthrough, and I’m a little panicky. Maybe the only way to settle this is through a marathon series session. Hmmm. What do you think? And more importantly, what were your summer gaming traditions, and do you still observe them today?
Space is a crucial element in a video game. It helps dictate the environment, defines the limitations of the player, and establishes the boundaries that can either help or hinder one from progressing through what can sometimes be many many hours of real world time. The way that the interactive environment has evolved—from concrete and planar to a fluctuating open-world 3D ecosystem—gives the awesome impression that you can “go anywhere” and “do anything.” Unfortunately, it’s kind of the exact opposite: with such a highly complicated and tech-based infrastructure, the freedom a player actually experiences is all in-game, and the possibilities of trying to color outside the lines (or full-out “breaking” it) are getting fewer and farther in-between. Many people like their realism, and that’s fine, but sometimes I wish that games hearkened back to the olden days (of yore), when the discourse was more elastic and dictated by gameplay, and the spatial relationships were more “open.”
For instance, a mechanic (shudder) that seems to have fallen by the wayside involves a looping, continuous line authored by the player: when the character you control travels in one direction, he/she will continue in that direction, even if they leave the playing field. If they go off of the screen, this doesn’t result in failure and/or a lost life: you’ll simply cycle around to the other side of the screen without ever losing any momentum. Kid Icarus (1987) utilizes this concept in some of its level design—what appears to be a blocked vertical path can actually be circumvented by moving from one side of the screen to the other, not by traveling across the designated geographic layout of the level but by purposely leaving that space and popping out on the other side. In other words, the player is manipulating the game’s “negative” space. Pac-Man (and his Ms.) allow for this technique also, as you can move from one side of the board to the other via the two openings in the middle of the maze, a quick way to avoid closely pursuing ghosts. Early one-screen arcade and NES titles like the original Mario Bros. and Balloon Fight contain an extra dimension of strategy because of the perpetual direction you can apply to both sides of the board at any given time.
I remember one of my literary professors back in college describing Eastern writing as “spiral-like” by nature, and that concept stuck with me ever since. Modern Japanese authors like Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami employ a writing style that is both flowing and cohesive, never lingering on a plot point yet also never failing to laterally connect with the events that came before. The results are fluid, briskly paced works that, while often dealing with the surreal and fantastic, never have any rough edges or tangential prose. The plots of most games—retro and modern—certainly don’t hold a candle to the masterpieces of the great Eastern novelists, but in games like Kid Icarus, the spiral materializes in other, more implicit forms. (It may seem like I’m trying to argue that this is a fundamentally “Japanese” quality, but games like Williams’ Joust and Rare’s Jetpac also use the non-terminating line, although the argument of whether any particular game influenced any other is an historical matter that I’d rather skirt for the time being.)
Another interesting implementation of space is “warping,” but in the case of a game like Super Mario Bros. (1986), the idea of using an interstitial space to travel between two points within a game’s diegesis is actually a tool with a physical presence: the pipe. This was all designed as a means to encourage exploration and tuck away secrets that could be discovered after multiple play-throughs, of course, and I concede that there is something very whimsical and fun about having Mario duck into a pipe or climb a quickly growing vine as a means to traverse terrain that breaks from the game’s pre-established norms, but it seems that a little bit of the “metaness” charm present when you actually force yourself off-screen is lost by making it a mechanic (oh, that dreaded word again). It turns into something explicitly anticipated and flaunted by the designers instead of being a more subtle technique that creates the illusion that the player is discovering and exploiting some unseen bit of architecture all by themselves. But the pipe serves a valuable purpose: by being an in-game object in SMB (one that everyone recognizes) that is also a vehicle for quickly skipping through game areas or accessing secret rooms, it fills in a spatial gap that would otherwise break our engagement with Mario’s world if we simply just jumped, say, from World 1 to World 4; without the pipe, it would seem like a cheat, like we were passing over something, but with it we instantly picture Mario tubing through some unseen labyrinth of plumbing that some very enthusiastic Mushroom Kingdom planning committee drew up one night. And all of this taking place telepathically, while the screen flashes black.
The “continuous line” principle does make a brief comeback in Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) (or Doki Doki Panic, depending on whose side you’re on), but unfortunately it’s severely restricted as the closed, mostly scrolling, and compartmentalized level design is not very conducive to physics-based platforming puzzles or strategic cross-screen vegetable throwing combat. You would think that the boss fights might try to involve some geo-spatial quandaries, but alas, the lairs in which you battle these large enemies are woefully brick-laden and claustrophobic, with hardly any character finessing involved at all; it becomes either a block stacking mini-game fit for a robotic operating buddy, or a surprisingly boring round of explosive hot potato.
With the advent and popularity of side-scrolling in game design, the fixed screen grew out of favor and never really came back in any significant way, with some exceptions (the puzzle genre, for one). Even today, I don’t think that developers want to mess with the idea of left-right screen wrapping anymore: it’s too jarring, too unrefined. How can Realism exist when the player is given the opportunity to go Dada? And while warping remains a feature in use today, it certainly doesn’t have that element of discovery and imagination that it did in the days of SMB—oh look, Niko, you found a subway car. Stand clear of the closing doors.
I would love to see more clever uses of negative and interstitial spaces in today’s games, because the potential is there: Closure(2009) is an excellent example of “negative” design done right, and Portal (2007) deliciously hints at how continuous momentum would work in a 3-D environment. I say “hints at” because Portal uses its level design to cocoon a system of control around its concepts instead of allowing much player freedom, but hey, everything starts somewhere. Can you imagine a Portal multiplayer mode, for example, in which the maps are simple, single rooms, much like the one-screen boards of Balloon Fight? Or a game where the player can only inflict damage or influence the environment when their avatar is out of view, in the game’s ”between” spaces, resting in the seams? Perhaps by looking back at the early titles (ofyore, remember) that favored a more interactive method of spatial discourse, video games can be open-ended enablers of self-narrative that also feature the polish and production values that gamers enjoy today. There’s no reason why developers can’t focus their hindsight a little more; after all, the line of technology is always curving, never straight, and the most important quality of a spiral is that it can continue to grow while still revolving around its origin.
A round-up of nervous back-pedals, apologies and shout-outs. I placed my hyphens ironically, but no one will understand.
I realize now that in my post on the music of Super Mario Galaxy I may have given composer Mahito Yokota short shrift. This was absolutely not my intention! Yokota’s amazing work on the score and orchestration of SMG is in part the main reason why I wanted to write the piece in the first place. What I was attempting to do with my article was bring to mind the idea that Koji Kondo has instilled a certain “value” into the Mario series, that value being mainly a “living” soundtrack that coalesces with the gameplay in a masterful manner that is seldom explored in other games. Kondo’s philosophy carries over to the Mario games being developed today, and Yokota has proven himself a talented composer in his own right, keeping the legacy of great Mario soundtracks alive. Hope that clears things up!
It’s funny; I’m still trying to figure out exactly HOW to get my voice out there in the blogosphere and incite discussion and feedback, but I’m so self-conscious of it that I usually end up e-stammering like I’m the new 7th grade student at a very cliquey middle school. There’s an unabashed casualness amongst video game writers and journalists that’s both threatening and inviting at the same time. I haven’t wrapped my head around the decorum yet. Twitter has only made things worse; it’s an extremely selective social system that parades under the guise of a slow motion open chat room. Sure, you can @reply anyone and everyone you want, but I wonder, who is going to actually take you seriously if they don’t know you in the first place? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to devalue the merits of Twitter; it’s actually been an extremely useful networking tool and has allowed me to meet and chat with some great folks who I don’t think I would have otherwise. I think what I’m trying to do, rather, is apologize for some of the inane outbursts and filler tweets I’ve done lately as an attempt to “fit in” with a crowd that I don’t have the right to roll with. Clearly, I just need to calm down and focus on what matters: the content. Always the content.
As a way to absolve myself from the embarrassing @replies and forum posts, please allow me to recommend some websites:
Nobuooo
Nobuooo pitches itself as “User-submitted Videogame Music News,” and for a videogame music junkie like myself, it’s deliciously niche. An impressive source of VGM related articles, interviews, and fan remixes make up the majority of Nobuooo’s content, but the site also has a self-produced video series that is positively bursting with fascinating info (the latest episode features an interview with Tenchu series composer Noriyuki Asakura). The work that the prolific Jeriaska has put into the site is truly commendable.
Infinite Lives
The internet has a lot to say about former 1up Community Manager Jenn Frank, but the truth of the matter is that she has the enthusiasm and intelligence of a hardcore gamer without the pretension, and I find that really refreshing. The gal’s got spunk. She’s also got an excellent website that consistently points me in the direction of retro-themed goodness. For example, she recently ran a story on the Retro Arcade Museum in Beacon, New York, a place that I will soon be visiting with a hammer and a hollowed out wheelchair.
Living Epic: Video Games in the Ancient World Roger Travis’s blog marrying video games with the discipline of classics always makes for an interesting read, and something that I’ve always appreciated about Living Epic is that Travis takes the time to patiently and thoughtfully respond to comments, creating an honest-to-goodness dialogue with his readers. He’s also been posting much more frequently (a New Year’s resolution, he claims), so it definitely deserves bookmarking.
Finally, I want to thank you, Dear Reader, for taking the time to visit and read Blit. I may not be connected to the industry (in fact, I’m as far on the outskirts as you can get), but I do have a deep respect and passion for electronic games and enjoy sharing my thoughts about them. As always, I welcome feedback…in fact, I CRAVE it. Let me know what’s on your mind, what you think of the site, what you’d like to see in the future, etc. If you’re too shy to comment (and hey, I understand), then feel free to drop me a note at:
kurt AT bliterations DOT com
You can always follow me on Twitter as well. And I promise not to Tweet so haphazardly anymore.
The 20th anniversary of the Game Boy was a few days ago, as I’m sure you all know, and there’s been some fine retrospectives, personal reflections and historiography on the plucky little machine that moved so much product for Nintendo it kept them high above water even as its popularity with gamers waned. Seek and ye shall be rewarded, wanderer of the aether!
I’m sitting here trying to think of a way to articulate exactly what I want to say about the first and, in a way, only portable gaming console that I owned. Sure, I was one of the few lucky kids to have an older brother who instinctively wanted everything that his younger sibling didn’t (which is also a roundabout way of saying that we had a Game Gear in our household at the same time since he wanted a portable console that was “not Game Boy”), and I did later buy the successor to Nintendo’s savior, the Game Boy Advance. Heck, I’m currently playing Rhythm Heaven right now on my DS Lite, so it’s not like it was the ONLY portable system in my possession.
But, yes, in a way it was. My memories of Game Boy mostly consist of it being the first palpable object that I always took with me on long car trips and into doctors’ offices (save for my trusty yellow Sports Walkman). Most of my experiences with my DS have actually been indoors, on my sofa or at my day job on a slow day, and these play-sessions almost always have a tinge of boredom attached to them; its just a way to pass the time that also involves videogames. This wasn’t so with my Game Boy. There was an omnipresent THRILL in being able to play a videogame away from a television, with the screen and your hands so close together it almost felt as if you were symbiotically bonding with the machine, with all of your actions somehow becoming more immediate and empowering. This was the system that gave us Donkey Kong (1994), our first taste of the way our modern Mario games would control in a 3-D environment. The funny thing is, looking back, debuting Mario’s new move-set on Game Boy was the best method possible, as that instant and visceral feel of interacting with a screen so close within your personal space made the jump to 3-D realism pretty intuitive. It was a personal extension of character control on two different levels, but the results were one and the same.
Oh, and don’t even get me started on Link’s Awakening (1993). This game is championed by many, and I can certainly echo those sentiments. In fact, quite by accident, I made the overworld map of Koholint my desktop background at work a week before I realized that the Game Boy’s anniversary was approaching, but even before I decided to sit down and try to hash out my feelings on it, I was admiring the thought and care that went into the overworld design (click to view fullscreen):
Looking at this map as a cohesive whole, one can see how an area blends into the next in a natural geographic way. There aren’t really any jarring transitions from one environment to another, yet all of the standard Zelda ecosystems–graveyards, deserts, mountains, towns–are still intact. It actually seems like a living, breathing world, clearly evolved and alive well before you even turn your Game Boy on (which is all the more ironic and heartbreaking considering the story’s ultimate outcome). What’s even more brilliant about the layout of Koholint is that it begs to be explored: there are dense pockets of marshy swamps and shorelines and bushy fields that are TOO enticing for an explorer to simply scuttle through. The developers employed the perfect way to encourage this kind of exploration as well: an overhead map broken down into a grid of blacked out squares that are “filled-in” one by one, as you move from screen to screen. The temptation to “reveal” the entire map ensured that you would travel to every nook and cranny, leaving no stone unturned or rock wall un-bombed.
Well, I said I didn’t want to get started but I did anyway. Suffice it to say, I obviously have a very soft spot for Link’s Awakening since I’m gushing about the MAP. The game kept my eyes glued to that small green screen for hours. I remember taking a family trip to Napa during that time, but to be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what the landscape looked like. I can’t describe a single vine. I do, however, know every square inch of Koholint from memory.
So far, no other portable system has lived and traveled with me in quite that same way, and I don’t know if another one ever will. There are many great games for DS, and I certainly have the hope that maybe I’ll find another Link’s Awakening or Donkey Kong (or Picross or Metroid II or Super Mario Land 2 or Tetris), something that will grab and beckon me to take it out, to have its narrative meld with the one I have to follow every time I step outside of the escapist glow in my electronic sanctuary. In the meantime, Dear Game Boy, I have my memories…and frankly, isn’t that part of the fuel that sustains our passion for this medium anyway?
The greatness of game composer Koji Kondo has been expounded upon in countless articles, books, and blogs, so–as I’ve reiterated a few times already–I don’t want to use this precious space (or your time) to simply retread ground and talk about how great the man is. But seriously: this man is GREAT. His sound work really has proven to be monumental for video games, and not just because he crafts instantly recognizable and catchy melodies, but also because of the way in which these themes interact with the player within the context of the gameplay happening at any given time.
A concept that Kondo has mentioned in numerous interviews, and which appears to be more and more prominent in the work that he both composes and oversees, is that of “interactive” sound that morphs and changes depending on what action is taking place on-screen and where; in other words, dynamic composition.
We can trace this technique in Kondo’s work all the way back to Super Mario World (1991), in which an energetic percussion beat would accompany Mario as he rode Yoshi, and stop whenever he dismounted. I suppose if we thought about dynamic composition in this way, we can trace the concept even further back, all the way to Super Mario Bros. (1985), in which the music would speed up to a frenetic pace as the in-game timer winded down, adding a sense of urgency to a level that was, up to that point, a usually cheerful and exploratory game experience. It’s a small temporal detail that has a huge impact on the gameplay, something that Kondo would expand upon in his later musical scores.
In Super Mario 64 (1996), one can really get a clear picture of what Kondo was driving at concerning fluidity in game music, especially during the “Jolly Roger Bay” level, the first in a Mario game to feature swimming in a 3-D environment (discounting the castle moat in the hub-world, of course, which serves more as a sand-box for experimentation and practice than an actual stage). At the start of Jolly Roger Bay, a lone electric piano plays the soothing main theme, unaccompanied by any other instruments. It is only upon entering the water–in essence, beginning the level proper–that a string section enters the arrangement, and as you venture further, eventually reaching an underground cave and sunken pirate ship, the rhythm section fades up and the different layers and complexities of Kondo’s piece are fully revealed. While a player could simply marvel at the expanse of the lake and the beauty of the rendered environment from the shore (well, beautiful at the time, at least), that’s not the main objective that the designers wanted to convey. The true excitement, the “meat” of the stage, was beneath the surface of the water, and having the full score swell in if and only if you actually “dive in” is the perfect way to encourage the player to do so. One of the challenges of creating a good 3-D environment is to compel the player to explore and investigate areas that they can already see in front of them (pop-in and fog, consistent visual blemishes in Nintendo 64 games, are precisely the wrong way to go about doing this, as you’re constantly breaking from the reality of the space, and who wants to explore somewhere or something that’s always undermining its own construct anyway?); achieving this goal with an appropriate and, more importantly, CONTEXTUAL music cue is a stroke of genius on Kondo’s and Shigeru Miyamoto’s part.
While Super Mario Sunshine (2002) also exhibits these kinds of traits–Yoshi, once again, has an accompanying bongo drum beat whenever Mario rides him, for example–Super Mario Galaxy (2007) takes Kondo’s concepts of dynamic sound in videogames to another level entirely. In Galaxy, specific sound effects harmonize themselves with whatever music is playing in the background. So, not only does the music shift and change elastically according to what action is taking place and its location, but the sound of grabbing a coin, for example, actually has a different pitch depending on what chord the music is on the moment Mario grabs it. A tense moment in a level, say, the Ghost Ship, results in an appropriately tense sounding score, which itself results a coin grabbing sound effect that doesn’t feel inherently positive, like a major chord, but is instead a tad dark and mysterious, like those Halloween-y sounding diminished 7th chords in music. This seems like a fairly innocuous mechanism, but it really helps to bond the player and environment together (see Flower (2009) for a recent application of this).
We can also hear this same type of aural effect at the main menu screen, where the twinkling sound of selecting your file can vary depending on the temporal position of the musical interlude occurring at that same moment. Again, this is a small and seemingly inconsequential detail at first, but it results in a videogame that has an almost anthropomorphic nature, constantly resonating with itself in an immediate and organic way so that every nuance of sound is in perfect harmony with each other…AND the player. The result that Kondo and his team is trying to achieve, I think, is one of total immersion, with every aspect of the game fitting together like a giant interlocking puzzle or sculpture. This isn’t a case of different departments coming together and simply combining their parts, but instead, much like a symphony, is a collective voice made up of many smaller components that are all performing in the same key and with the same timbre.
And this is all without even taking into consideration the actual music of Super Mario Galaxy itself, which is amazing stuff! Having lush symphonic orchestrations accompany the player from level to level gives the game a much deeper sense of space and scope, creating sonic expanses that appropriately echo the notion that Mario has moved beyond pipe mazes and Cheese Bridges and has become a full-fledged astronaut, soaring between planetary masses with dignified resolve (credit must be given to composer/arranger Mahito Yokota, who helped create most of Galaxy’s score under Kondo’s supervision). What’s more, there are wonderful judgements regarding when to use these epic arrangements. My favorite example is the Comet Observatory, which serves as a hub-world in the way that Peach’s Castle did in SM64. As the player progresses through the game, unlocking new areas by collecting stars and restoring power to the gigantic floating structure, the music shifts from a thin, mostly synthetic arrangement–save for a few recorded instruments, such as flute and harp–to a majestic, swelling live orchestra. These kinds of thoughtful touches result in a score that’s not only the best for the Mario series, but one of the best game soundtracks in the last ten years.
Throughout the Mario series, we can see (or rather, hear) Kondo’s philosophy of dynamic composition shining through, reinforcing the solid standards of gameplay that Nintendo has made their bread and butter, and actually making it more fluid, more interactive and, ultimately, more fun. While Koji Kondo is certainly not an unsung hero in game design, the work that he and his group put into SuperMario Galaxy is more than just a part of what makes the game so good, but may very well be the cornerstone for the entire Mario series and a crucial element in that mysterious formula that keeps gamers enthralled by the squat Italian-American plumber again and again and again. It seems to me that the “essence of Mario” that Kondo has spoken of is also the essence of the composer himself, and both just happen to be perfectly in tune.
To celebrate Braid’s release on PC today (although as of this writing I’ve been unable to confirm it), I’m encouraging everyone to check out my article on the game if they haven’t already. In a way, Braid, and the piece I wrote on it for the Auteurs’ Notebook back in January, was what kick-started Bliterations and my timid but passionate foray into game writing. Kudos to Jonathan Blow, David Hellman and the rest of the Number None team for crafting such a beautiful and provocative (and fun) game. If you haven’t experienced it yet and have the means to acquire it, get it!
And then there is a game like Soul Blazer (1992), which encapsulates the fragile and tenuous balance between man and universe through roughly translated language that seems hewn from some half-completed philosophic masterwork by an author long forgotten before they could ever be remembered in the first place, illuminating moments of humanity that are probably spun at every minute of every day yet never quite brought to light in such a plain and beautiful way, and makes one wonder if a video game developer can indeed be unashamedly altruistic, wanting nothing more than to use their games as a means to impart simple existential wisdom through lines of code and patterns of colored squares, too small to be counted individually but all equally essential for the glowing tapestry that we can sometimes actually take to heart, if we are willing.
I decided a short time ago to “dust off” some video games I remember sniffling through as a kid, partly to satiate my desire to weave some kind of internal magnum opus about my personal gaming history, but also because I’ll use any excuse that I can to revisit an old title and scrutinize whether they hold steadfast today or knock my rose-tinted glasses clean off my face. Unfortunately, most of the time they are the latter, but sometimes you get a nice a surprise. Case in point: Gumshoe (1986) for the NES.
I know that my horrible dime-store Hammett post title indicates that the game isn’t very accessible, and trust me, I certainly don’t like it by any means. Gumshoe is a “zapper” light-gun controlled game that also happens to be a platformer, and that is every bit as oblique and frustrating as it sounds. You actually have to shoot the main character—hard-nosed and scraggly bearded FBI agent turned detective Mr. Stevenson—to make him jump as he automatically moves from left to right through four stages of various locales. Enemies like dive-bombing crows, moths and, uh, liquor bottles impede your path; cars try to furtively sneak up behind you and run you over (too bad their horns seem to be stuck); and there are glowing instant-death boxes EVERYWHERE, complete with skull and crossbones plastered on the outside of them. Considering that you only have a limited supply of ammo (although there is a constant stream of red balloons that replenish bullets and shooting your character does not deplete their number, fortunately) and that the poor sleuth cannot keep his perpetual motion in check, this game can be brutally difficult. There’s just no way to stop Stevenson, unless you run him into a ledge or wall at juuuust the right angle. Even then, that’s a fruitless technique, as all it does is briefly change his direction; as soon as Stevenson hits the ground, he promptly continues his suicide march. Not even the attract mode can save him, since without any light gun input from the player, the first obstacle encountered on-screen will end the demo.
Let’s go back to those death boxes for a minute. When I say they are everywhere, they literally are, peppering the sky and forcing Stevenson to clumsily pick his way through this mine-field, often in mid-air. Imagine my surprise when, in the second level, I accessed a secret area in which there were skyscrapers made up entirely of these boxes…and you could walk on them without taking any damage! Was this some sort of practical joke on Nintendo’s part? Were they trying to frighten you into thinking that you now couldn’t touch ANYTHING for the rest of the game, only to pull the rug out from under you and force you to question what actually qualified as a “death brick” and what wasn’t? Playing through this area in Gumshoe is one of the more surreal moments in a videogame that I’ve ever experienced, as it was a sort of self-referential jab at the very confines of game semiotics: “Death boxes don’t necessarily mean death…but you sure thought they did, didn’t you? Also, this next box will kill you. Think about that.”
So yes, Gumshoe is a maddening game, relentless with its auto-scrolling construct and failing miserably to marry a 2D platformer with twitch shooting, especially since you have to be keeping track of both genre mechanics SIMULTANEOUSLY. That wasn’t the pleasant surprise that I discovered.
The soundtrack, though, is a different story.
What a glorious score this game has! For a 1986 NES title, the music has an amazing amount of depth and verisimilitude. In fact, the game’s dirty jazz tunes (which, admittedly, only make up a fraction of the score) are the only ligature holding the game’s gritty detective narrative together. Without it, it’s just a fever dream hodgepodge of raining boulders, giant armadillos, jumping swordfish, and other mid-80’s videogame idioms designed to kill you as quickly as possible instead of fleshing out the environment. Take, for example, the music at the beginning of the game, when you receive a ransom note detailing how to save Jennifer, Stevenson’s kidnapped daughter. Or the moments when you receive hints via anonymous phone calls at booths placed throughout the game. Even the music that accompanies the death animation has a Henry Mancini big band feel to it, with slippery horns that punctuate Stevenson’s horrific open-mouthed death yawn. Believe it or not, but Gumshoe, at times, successfully draws me into the seedy world of the private eye, and it’s all thanks to the thoroughly engaging chip-tunes. You listen to these sloppy traps and try to tell me otherwise:
But, while these gnarly vamps are brilliant in their own way, the rest of the score also rises above standard NES fare. Complex in their harmonies but rhythmically inviting, these pieces make Gumshoe almost worth playing through. Almost. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much information on who may have composed it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka had a hand in its creation, as there are definitely some “Tanakisms” present, like the persistent lack of an overarching melody or main theme, the stark minimalism, the incorporation of strange sound effects, even the use of bongos (or “bongo-like” sounds at least), which eventually found its way into the beboppin’ battle music of Earthbound (1995), which Tanaka collaborated on with Keiichi Suzuki.
It’s pretty clear that whomever composed the music for Gumshoe appreciated the nuances of jazz and knew how to create simple yet precise compositions with the NES sound chip, which is why I’ve got my money on Tanaka, but if anyone out there has the knowledge and is willing to share, please do so. In any event, it’s a fantastic score for a wholly unique but flawed 8-bit game, and it deserves your ears’ attention.
*Hard to get into but sounds great. I apologize retroactively.
Gameplay Footage (skip to 5:30 in the second clip to see the hidden “death-skyscraper” section):
