Inside The Score - Super Mario 64 - File Select

Everything is gonna be okie dokie

Indeed, the song that lets you know everything is gonna be oki doki. A short piece of music that can instantly transport anyone as far back as 1996 to the very first memories of Super Mario 64; it is Christmas morning and this is the moment you are about to embark on a brand new Mario adventure the likes of which had never been seen before. A brand new realistic world that still remains the biggest leap in visuals for video game characters in a single generation. You are at the lounge right before entering a new reality.

Back when the sounds themselves were characters in the game that you end up distinguishing as opposed to just ‘professionally well recorded orchestra’. The magical sounds of the pan flute immediately identify this as a Nintendo 64 era game and as part of the DNA built for Mario 64 for anyone whose ears come in contact with it; it is so much a part of the identity of the games themselves that even in remakes Kondo specifically ask for composers to track down the original primitive samples even though the new arrangers want to use better sounds. So both the sound design and musical composition end up contributing to that characteristic sense of bittersweet nostalgia Koji Kondo was adept at with just a few well placed notes even if a menu screen does not need these feelings. It is all right there in the piece. You don’t even have to have played the game to get the sense on longing within it. Because for some reason during this era some Nintendo games decided that the basic interface of file select screens should be accompanied with a sense of yearning and melancholy as heard also in Star Fox 64 instead of just exciting or cool synth menu music. It was a trend probably inspired by the The Legend of Zelda screen select theme which has the soothing Great Fairy theme, so it was probably a way to make players feel relaxed right before the start of a new play session.

And it is a piece that only very recently was revisited in the series, being used on the brand new Mario Kart World as a transitional cue between tracks, that is, race tracks; okay, also tracks.

Musical Analysis

As has been discussed there are some cheat codes in place to make a piece automatically feel nostalgic on first listen. Here we got the straightforward Ionian/Major profile doing the bulk of the work showing that this mode is not only for ultra happy tunes but also can pack a tender punch. The main reason for this is the vamp between the I and the IV chord which is a very smooth chord transition due to the fact that the root note of the one, the tonic, remains in place and the other two notes move just a little; in this case we get the key of G and the two note implied chords move from [G-D] to [C-E] with smooth voice leading. It is a harmony progression that will be deployed again for the End Credits theme of the game alongside the same pan flutes, creating a connection between opening and closing.

The other cheat code is the pedal melody technique in which the same melodic material is used for each chord, the changing harmony coloring the exact same melody and giving it a new identity. You can pretty much play a I to IV vamp repeating ad nauseam a short ostinato on top of it and it already will yield that yearning sound automatically. In this case, however, the piece has a proper melody presumably made of question-answer blocks all with the same rhythmic profile in which the questions are always the same and only the answers differ, a classic approach to melody writing. Each chord will accompany a basic question-answer block; the I-IV vamp will then be a macro question-answer block and what we could call Section 1 and Section 2 of the piece will be the macro question-answer block at the lowest resolution. At the end of the day many pieces can be seen as atomic question-answer blocks inside bigger question-answer blocks creating sort of a fractal pattern or like those Russian matrioska dolls). Here there is a catch for the first part though.

So using that framework to analyze the melody and harmony here we have the question motif over the G chord: [G D D A D B]. The rhythm of this phrase will be the main motif for all the melodies. This question block then receives an answer which varies the rhythm for contrast : [D B C D]. Then you repeat the same question but now over the C chord, creating the pedal melody effect. So the melodic structure would be:

[ (G D D A D B – D B C D) – (G D D A D B – ) ] First first parenthesis over G, second over C

And as can be noticed here the second question never receives an answer even though the piece would be perfectly serviceable if Kondo had decided to do it. Without it it just introduces asymmetry into the composition making it more unpredictable.

The vamp then repeats and after that goes to the second section which would be the macro answer to the entire first part. Naturally, for variety, there are new chords and melody here—still with the same rhythm motif though, now used for both question and answer phrases—The melody phrases feel now slower because now the question-answer blocks are distributed to every single bar of music. This time the composition is symmetrical with both question blocks receiving an answer. The implied chords of the smooth moving harmony would be:

[ (G – Am) – (G – C) ]

The ii adding even more melancholy to the proceedings.

As can be seen in the voice leading, the choir sample never leaps more than a whole step.

Another classic Mario staple found here is contrasting this straight melody line with a percussion part which is swinging, a not so common technique that gives Mario music its characteristic bounce and was the basis for its main theme back in the original Super Mario Bros. In fact the congas and tambourine are doing the exact same Latin, reggaeton sounding rhythm that we found on the D section from that Mario series theme.

The choir sample which is also another distingued character from the soundtrack is first heard here. It is a synthesized voice sample appropriately called ‘Lost Boy’ from the Digidesign SampleCell II Library.