Okada doesn’t limit himself to the 16-bit era, though.
▼ By the way, our new dream is to have a trained musician performing live during all of our gamer sessions. For Super Mario Kart, he cycles through four different pieces within the first minute, and also emulates the sound of the race-start countdown. ▼ Starting off with the first game for the system, here’s Super Mario World.īut what makes Okada’s videos extra special (aside from his assistance on formal concert attire) is that he’s not just performing the background music, but many of the sound effects too! Starting with the signature “coin” sound effect that many Nintendo games play on start up, his Super Mario World video also has him using his violin for the sound of dino buddy Yoshi hatching from an egg and spitting out enemies, the distressing footsteps of perilous enemy Chargin’ Chuck, and even the audio accompaniment of on-screen explanation text blocks.Īlso impressive is how deftly Okada switches from one piece of background music to another on the fly, in real-time.
SUPER MARIO WORLD SOUND EFFECTS FULL
In particular, there’s a distinct quality to how the system’s sound chip could replicate the sound of stringed instruments, and now that’s come full circle as Japanese YouTuber Teppei Okada performs amazing violin covers of famous Super NES soundtracks. The SNES was really the first cartridge-based console that could recognizably approximate the sound of a wide range of musical instruments, allowing its games’ arrangements to go far beyond beeps and bloops.
Something that often got overlooked, though, was something that couldn’t be seen: how nice Nintendo’s 16-bit system sounded. Thanks to its Mode 7 scaling/rotation effects and maximum of 256 simultaneous onscreen colors, when the Super NES was released it instantly boasted some of the prettiest video games ever seen.
Beautiful selections from Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda, and more stir the heart and the nostalgia too.