Now that I have returned to the Kyoto headquarters, I would like to interview the staff members that were in charge of creating the sound of Super Mario Galaxy. Let’s start with introductions and begin with (Koji) Kondo-san, who is well-known for his work in the Mario and Zelda games.

I am Kondo, from the Sound Group of EAD (Entertainment Analysis and Development). Since this game was developed in the EAD Tokyo office, I joined the project as an adviser to ensure that the sound for the game would have the “Essence of Mario”. In addition, I composed four of the pieces for this new Mario game.

I am Yokota from EAD Tokyo. I was in charge of the composition and arrangement for almost all of the music. We recorded the music using a live orchestra, and so I also worked on arranging the music for the orchestra recording.

Hi, I am Kawamura of EAD Tokyo. For this game, I was responsible for sound-related programming, and creating the sound effects.

Yokota-san just mentioned that we used a live orchestra for recording the music.

That’s right. We actually recorded a video of how things went during the recording. Please, take a look.

The music makes you anticipate the great adventure to come. The expression Miyamoto-san has on his face in the video is not one you see him with very often.

After the recording, I heard him say “We were right to do that!”

This time, we recorded with an orchestra of about 50 or so members. Of course, they were not very good at first because they were playing music they’d never heard before, and they are also seeing the score for the first time. But as the day went on, their performance improved dramatically, and the process of recording each track in its final form was actually a very fast one. This surprised Miyamoto-san, who was glued to the glass wall looking at them from the other side. He was saying “So, sound is something that really changes too!”

I am sure that experience will be brought to life in Wii Music (name not final)¹. Anything that Miyamoto-san finds interesting will always end up in the form of a game! (laughs)

(laughs)

1	Wii Music (name not final) is a title that is scheduled for release in Japan 2008 on Wii in which the Wii Remote will be used to play a variety of musical instruments.

So, how did you end up deciding to use a live orchestra?

Every time I saw Miyamoto-san, I would always ask him, “How about using an orchestra?”

And you kept asking him until he answered “Okay”! (laughs)

That pretty much sums it up! (laughs) To record using an orchestra is not cheap, and we also had this fundamental concern as to whether using an orchestrated soundtrack would fit the rhythm of a Mario game. The sound of recent video game music is so high-quality and crystal clear, it's almost as if you're listening to a music CD you buy at a music shop. But I do question whether that kind of sound is always necessarily suited to the game.

It almost seems like while you're playing the game, the music is coming from a CD player, and not from the game console and it feels like you are obligated to play the game in time to the music. For that reason, Nintendo has only used a live orchestral soundtrack on a few occasions in the past.

I didn't want to use an orchestra just for the sake of it. I even thought that although you may be able to make the scale of the game seem more epic by using music from a live orchestral recording, it could end up sacrificing the game's rhythm and have the opposite of the intended effect. But when we made the music stream during game play... I'm sorry, does everyone know what I mean by streaming music?

That's when the game just plays pre-recorded music without it being synchronised to what is going on in the game.

Thank you! (laugh) In this game, even though we decided to stream the soundtrack, the game's rhythm improved, and the players are able to focus better on the game play. Of course, there was a lot of hard work involved behind the scenes.

And that's where Kawamura-san, the programmer comes in. What kind of things did you do?

Before working on Super Mario Galaxy, I had already been experimenting with getting sound effects to play in sync with the background music automatically. For instance, in Wind Waker², a sound effect will ring in sync with the music when you hit an enemy, and in Jungle Beat, the sound is played in sync with the music every time you jump. For this game, we wanted to take that system a step further; we experimented to find a way to make that system work with streamed music. And when we got a hold of the raw orchestra data and put it into the game, we thought "This is going to work!"

2	Wind Waker = The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is an action adventure game released for the Nintendo GameCube in Europe in May 2003.

So you made the game read the data waveform of the streaming music so that it could trigger the sound effects at the correct time?

This gets a little technical; the game synchronises MIDI³ data with the streaming data, and this is used to process the sound effects at the right time. When Mario shoots off from the Sling Star, for example, harp music plays as a sound effect. If you listen carefully, this harp will sound in perfect timing with the background music. This kind of technique rarely gets noticed however.

3	The MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) format allows the exchange of sound data between digital musical devices such as synthesisers, samplers and sequencers.

It's as if the melody from the harp is a totally natural part of the background music.

To make this possible, we really demanded a lot from the members of the orchestra. Music from the orchestra will play at the tempo that had been set in the studio, which usually is just a little off from the tempo of Mario running. I absolutely wanted to avoid using music that simply played regardless of the game's tempo, so I got this device that works in a similar way to a metronome, where it would tick at the exact tempo with the game. I asked the orchestra, "Please perform at exactly the same rhythm as this."

Normally, an orchestra would not use anything like a metronome when they perform.

To enhance the live feel of the orchestra, it's best to have as few of those kinds of restrictions as possible. But for this recording, we gathered the type of musician who can still perform at their best under those circumstances. After the recording, when they told me "It was great fun," I felt so relieved!

But even when you had decided to use an orchestra, you must not have been able to do the recording until the contents of the game were finalised.

Right! That was the toughest part!

(laughs)

It really felt as if we were walking on a tightrope. We weren't able to schedule the recording dates until Miyamoto-san gave us the green light. So we recorded all 28 tracks, constantly checking with him for each track, asking "Is this music okay for this stage?" so that we could be 100% sure that this music was really ready to be used.

It must not have been easy to arrange all 28 tracks.

It was tough, but since I was the one that wanted to do this...

You said “Please leave it to me” and had your budget approved; this was something you had to take charge of yourself! (laughs)

Miyamoto-san told me "It was really hard getting the budget approved. I'm expecting a lot from this." That put a lot of pressure on me! (laughs)

In the genre of game music, I think the most universally loved theme by people all over the world is "Mario Music". Kondo-san, as the composer of this music, you talked about "ensuring that the sound for the game would have the ‘Essence of Mario’" when you introduced yourself. What exactly is this "Essence of Mario" with regards to game music?

That's actually a very hard question. Even as someone who's been doing this for so long, I'm really not able to put it into words. There are an increasing number of people who are getting involved with Mario games, including people from outside our company, and though I am asked that question a lot by them, it's not something that I am able to answer in just a couple of words.

It’s hard to put it into words, but I think there clearly is something that defines the "Essence of Mario". I have touched on this in the last interview, but when everyone discussed what the "Essence of Zelda" might be, we really couldn’t come up with a single, clear definition of what it was. On the other hand, with the "Essence of Mario", it seems to me that everyone has their own opinion about what the "Essence of Mario" is, which differs depending on that person’s perspective.

The “Essence of Mario” was something I really thought about a lot when I knew that I would be in charge of the composition of music for this game. And the conclusion I hit upon was Latin music. Percussion instruments of Latin origin have been used frequently throughout the Mario series, like the steel drums⁴, bongos and congas⁵. Thinking that Mario music always used Latin music, I asked Kondo-san about it, but he told me that this Latin sound was never something he had been conscious of using. So when it was decided that I would compose the theme tune for Super Mario Galaxy, I tried not to rely on the orchestral sound that I was most comfortable with. I tried to make a piece that was pop with a taste of the tropics, and had a space-like feel to it...

4	Steel drums are percussion instruments originating from Trinidad and Tobago, and are made of steel barrels.
5	Bongos and congas are small drums used in Latin music.

"Pop with a taste of the tropics and a space-like feel... " What kind of music is that?! (laughs)

(laughs)

I mainly used Latin instruments, and expressed the space part by using a synthesiser to create that sound you hear in old Sci-Fi movies. The track isn't used in the final game so the players won't get to hear it, but it had actually been approved at one point by Koizumi-san, the director. My love for Nintendo games goes back a long time and I have spent a long time playing all the Mario games thoroughly. I was full of confidence when I presented that track to Kondo-san. But when I asked him "This is how Mario music should be, right?" he just replied "This is no good".

Were you shocked?

So much so that I thought about quitting my job! (laughs)

I remember observing Yokota-san at the time. He looked so down about it that I felt really sorry for him. He really did say "If this doesn't work, I will quit my job!"

(laughs)

When the track was rejected, the words that Kondo-san had said really stuck with me. Those words were "Yokota-san, if somewhere in your mind you have an image that Mario is cute, please get rid of it."

I see.

When I heard that, I realised that I had always had this image that Mario was a character for kids, and without realising it, I had been composing “cute” music that I thought would appeal to children. I asked Kondo-san at the time, "Then what kind of music would work with Mario?” He replied that "Mario is cool".

You must have thought, "You could have told me that in the first place!" (laughs)

(laughs)

At first, all he told me was "If it matches the game, you can make anything you want." (laughs)

When I worked on composing music for Mario, I never had the image of Mario being cute. I had always worked on composing music based on what I thought was cool at that moment in time. For the Mario games on the SNES and the Nintendo 64, I composed the music thinking about what kind of music was popular, and what was going on in the world at the time. I composed music that I thought sounded cool at the time, and I made it fit the visuals of Mario games. Thinking back to the way I composed the music back then, I think saying that "Mario's music should sound cool" is the most apposite way to describe what these pieces are aiming for.

At heart, Mario games are cool adventure games. And particularly this time around with the theme of the game being a dramatic action-adventure where Mario travels through space, using an orchestra emphasised its grand scale. We now have theme music that is dramatically different from what you have heard in other Mario games. However, completing that theme music was no picnic! (laughs)

What do you mean?

When the first piece I made was rejected, Kondo-san told me "Well, we have plenty of time. You’re just going to have to rack your brains and come up with a better one". On top of that, Koizumi-san, the director, complimented me saying "It wasn't so bad".

"It wasn't so bad"?! That doesn’t sound much like a compliment to me! (laughs)

(laughs)

I was told "Even if it doesn't work out now, someday you will be done with all this", and from then, I struggled for about three months.

So, after struggling for three months and getting so stressed you thought about quitting, you finally completed the theme music. What was the breakthrough that helped you finish it?

I invited Miyamoto-san to the room where we were composing the game music and had him listen to several tracks that had different styles from each other. At that point, the only thing I could think of was to have Miyamoto-san direct me on the general direction of the soundtrack. So I picked three pieces for him to listen to: one with an orchestral sound, one which was a mix of orchestral music and pop music, and the last was pop music. At that time, I didn't tell him who wrote which piece, and he picked the piece “Egg Planet”, saying “Let’s go with this style.” Please, have a listen to it.

You can tell just by listening to it, but there are no drums used in this piece at all and the tropical sound that was present in previous Mario games is also gone.

This piece was used at last year's E3 as well, wasn’t it?

This piece was actually written by Kondo-san. Miyamoto-san had chosen Kondo-san's music without even knowing who had made it. This reaffirmed my thoughts that Kondo-san really knows Mario games. I was so stressed until that point, but at that moment, I managed to break through the stress and choose the direction of Super Mario Galaxy’s soundtrack.

So through this piece, you were no longer limited to tropical sounds and Latin music.

That's right. Miyamoto-san had told me "This is good! This sounds the most space-like." but he never said "This sounds the most like Mario."

There are times that if you think too much about “the sound of Mario”, you’ll get unnatural music that’s even hard to listen to during game play, and it’ll end up not sounding like Mario at all. I think that, ultimately, cool-sounding music that fits the rhythm of the games makes up the sound of Mario.

Even though the tropical sounds in Super Mario Bros. did leave a strong impression on the listener, the style of the music changed completely depending on the stage. The sound of the music expressed the atmosphere of the game world. Since Miyamoto-san was looking for a sound to express the world of Super Mario Galaxy, he must have said your work sounded “like space” rather than “like Mario” because he wanted to express the setting of space in music as well. As someone who had studied industrial design, Miyamoto-san approaches things in terms of functionality first, and he must have wanted the music to aid the design to really make the game world come alive.

I really think so, too.

But because nobody was able to tell you these things in words, you struggled for quite a long time.

In retrospect, the time I spent struggling trying to make music that sounded like Mario may have been a waste of time, but by struggling so much, the impact when I realised these things was all the stronger. Kondo-san then came to say the music I made from that point on had “become natural”.

What do you mean by "natural"?

The impression that the music was slavishly trying to be like previous Mario music had disappeared. Before that, many of the pieces felt like they secretly wanted to copy the Mario sound, and the presence of elements like that made them sound unnatural.

Perhaps the tracks trying to imitate something that they were not was what made it difficult for the listeners to get into the music.

Because it was something that did not come naturally from the creator, I was not able to accept it. The thing is though, something like this is very hard to explain in words, so I think Yokota-san must have had a very rough time! (laughs)

(laughs)

Kondo-san, have you ever struggled in a similar way yourself? You’ve been working on sound with Miyamoto-san for such a long time; surely you must have been through a lot of these struggles?

I struggle all the time! (laughs) Even though I was the one that composed the music in the first place, I always struggle with how I should make it different from the previous music and how I should make it sound new.

You composed four of the pieces for this game; how did it come to be that Yokota-san ended up being responsible for most of the soundtrack instead of the entire soundtrack?

Yokota-san was the sound director, and he asked me to make some music because he needed some tracks by me, too, so I worked on pieces for the scenes they were requested for.

When all the music is made by one person, it’ll end up all sounding the same. If a piece that's playing in an important part of the game has the same sound as another piece used in a different scene, it won’t leave an impression on the player.

You wanted the music to have variety.

That's right. So, I asked Kondo-san to work on some music because I definitely wanted to use pieces with his sound for certain scenes of the game.

"Use your boss wisely". That’s a great tradition of our company! (laughs)

(In a slightly sad tone) I thought I might get to make a lot more pieces for this game, but it was a lot less than I’d hoped for...

What?! Why didn't you tell me that while we were still working on the game?!

(roaring laughter)

But Yokota-san worked at a very fast pace, creating pieces one after the other. I was impressed by the speed at which you worked.

Since I was put in charge of the music for this game, I felt that I didn't want to become a nuisance to Kondo-san. Didn't I promise you that I would work on my own as much as I could, and that I’d only come to you for help when I was really having trouble?

...Well, I guess so.

(laughs)

Still, being put in charge of sound for the latest Mario game must have put a lot of pressure on you?

Oh yeah, so much so that I thought about quitting my job! (laughs) Mario is Nintendo's flagship title, after all. But at the very least, I think I was able to portray the vastness of space in Super Mario Galaxy, which I think was something that could only be expressed by the magnificent scale of an orchestra.

This may be a tradition of Nintendo’s, but I think Miyamoto-san is very picky when it comes to sound effects. I was very surprised when I first found out about his adamant demands for sound effects “with substance” that are completely synchronised with the feel of the game. But Kondo-san, you must have been trained thoroughly over the years in what Miyamoto-san demands. Do you have any memorable moments?

The first sound that Miyamoto-san made me make over and over again was the stabbing sound when you hit enemies from the Disk System version of Zelda⁶. I was dealing with the limited sound capabilities of the NES, and it was hard to come up with a sound with any punch. So I had him listen repeatedly to find a sound he liked, and I remember I remade that sound over and over again. An extra audio channel had become available for the Disk System version, and I was planning on using that for the music. But Miyamoto-san told me, "Let's use it for the sound effects."

6

The Disk System version of Zelda was the very first of the "Legend of Zelda" series, and was released on the Disk System for the Famicom (Japanese version of the NES) in Japan in February 1986. This version is the same as the version sold as an NES cartridge outside of Japan, which was released in Europe in November 1987.

That must have been a harsh decision for someone who wanted to compose music.

So, I made the music using the original three channels of the Famicom. But by using new sound sources to create things like monsters' cries, I think we were able to create sound effects that the player could really feel, which were non-existent in earlier games.

Though the music of Super Mario Bros. is famous too, you can also tell just by hearing the sound effects when Mario grabs a mushroom and grows bigger, when he's collecting coins, and so on. I think it’s safe to say that these sound effects leave a strong impression, but creating these sound effects mustn’t have been easy either, right?

It was hard. With very limited memory, it was quite a challenge to make sound effects that were effective.

Back when we were making Famicom games, the sound engineers were allowed to use only a total of anywhere between 1 kilobyte to 1.5 kilobytes of memory. I remember this because early on, I wrote sound programs for games too.

That's the size of a text file! (laughs)

(laughs)

But now, you can use large amounts of data in games, and I think now there’s no limit to what you can do in terms of sound. For this game, what was the part you put the most effort into?

That would be all of the sound work! (laughs) For this game, though, we could use the Wii Remote's speaker, but even though we did put a lot of work into using it, we decided not to have it constantly producing sounds. At first, we were tempted to make all sorts of sounds come from it, but when the sound coming out from the speaker was exactly the same as the sound coming from the TV, it lost all meaning. So we changed it so it would basically be used for Mario's actions, such as the sound it makes when you hit an enemy. We endeavoured to create substantial sounds that the players could feel, as if they were part of the action.

The Wii Remote rumbles at the same time, too, and I think the way the sound comes from where your hand is brings in a whole new level of depth in creating an interactive medium. So what kind of things did you come up with in making the most of the Wii Remote speaker?

Well, for example, we made it so that when Mario gets Star Bits, you will first hear a sound effect coming from the TV, and then just after, you will hear another Star Bit sound coming from the Wii Remote.

By slowing the tempo of that second sound on purpose, it makes it feel like the Star Bits actually fly into your hands. There are a lot of features in this game that use the Wii Remote's shake control, like shooting Mario away to the next planet using the Star Sling, and knocking out Goombas, and we worked hard on sounds that make shaking the Wii Remote fun.

Besides the Wii Remote sounds, were there any other sound effects that you put extra effort into?

I really put a lot of work into the sounds for the file selection screen. We also went through quite a lot of trial and error in creating the sound effect for when Mario moves using the Pull Star.

That sound has been well-received by those who've heard it. It has an outer space feel to it, and it also feels like you’re floating.

We called in a professional engineer and worked hard on the “mixdown”, which is a process where you adjust the sound balance. Usually something like this would only take a day, but we spent three whole days on it, and we tuned each track one by one while playing the game to adjust them right down to the fine details. For example, to make the best use of the sparkling sound that you hear when collecting Star Bits, we toned down the sparkling parts in the music so that the sound would fit in better within the game.

There were a lot of people in the development staff who were very interested in the sound, including Miyamoto-san. I think that was why we were able to put so much effort into it. If we tried to do it with only the sound staff, we would get a little greedy and want to put even more sounds into the game. But if you can’t properly explain to the other staff why the sounds should be added, they’ll just lower the sound’s priority and tell you "If you have the time to worry about something so small, you should work on more important things."

I’ve heard a lot about how they forgot to invite the sound staff to the post-development party after the game was finished. (laughs)

(roaring laughter)

I think this is made even worse because the sound team is shut off in another room to work on the sounds. So if the people at the centre of development don’t care a whole lot about the sound, being the sound engineer can become a very lonely job.

But while working on this game the director, Koizumi-san, often talked about sounds with substance.

I think that's a tradition of Miyamoto-san and his pupils. He says things like, "This is the most important action in this game, but this sound makes it sound really weak." Since today you’ve revealed a lot about what goes on behind the scenes, I am sure the readers will pay attention to the sound effects when they play the game. Sound effects are essentially there so that the players can better enjoy the game, so unlike the music, sometimes they may not be recognised by the players as something special.

In the past, I felt like telling people to pay more attention to the music instead of the sound effects, but I don’t feel like that any more. I think the sound of Super Mario Galaxy is made by the combination of the sound effects and the music.

Even so, don't you have certain sounds you want the players to listen for?

I don't think the sound should ever get in the way of game play. I was trained well by Kondo-san about how you would get an earful if you let that happen! (laughs)

I said that because I know how important sound effects are.

The experience of having that one channel taken away from you back in the Disk System days must have made quite an impact on you! (laughs)
Now to wrap things up, please say a word or two to the players.

Super Mario Galaxy is the first Mario game to use an orchestral soundtrack, and I think this has made it into a game that has wonderful sound. I really hope you enjoy it.

I was in charge of the sound, but at the same time I'm a big fan of Mario games, so I also helped to adjust the game's difficulty level as a staff member.

(laughs)

You don't hear things like that often! (laughs)

Right, so along with the sound, please enjoy playing the game.

I worked on the sound design hoping the players would naturally be able to get into the world of Mario. But I've also put in a few sound games, so please look out for them. I'm sure you'll have a smile on your face when you find them.

Let's leave it to the players to find them. Thank you all very much! Now, for the next and final interview, I will talk to Miyamoto-san, whose name has already frequently appeared in these interviews.