Inside The Score - Super Mario All-Stars - Castle (SMB)

Inferno

The musical equivalent of two walls closing in to crush you. The serpentine track written for the Koopa castle is the pinnacle of claustrophobia, taking the dissonance of the Underground theme to its extreme in this diminutive cue that keeps going and going stressing you out throughout the castle run; exactly what it s supposed to be doing. This is not meant for listening, it does not need to be good, it just needs to work and enhance the gameplay, contrasting with the other three main level tracks to create a balanced soundtrack consisting of two consonant and two dissonant gameplay cues that would go on to become a template for all gaming, just expanded upon but never having the opportunity of being more iconic. Yet, this one understandably has seen less use in the series due to its heavy dissonant and not at all pleasant nature.

Musical Analysis

This one is pure tension, using the bass channel to make the melody while the pulse waves are meant to play infernal ultra fast arpeggios that are dislocated with each other to create something that feels gothic, dissonant and dizzying. Here we have a version of the arpeggio slowed down so you can hear the exact pattern.

This might be the most effective loop since it feels as if it was just an ostinato endlessly playing without any cadence whatsoever. It is the shortest level cue, contrasting with the long Overworld theme which has to be that way due to being there in most levels. This one only plays at the end of each 4-set level but still strives to get you slowly insane as these castle levels end up becoming harder and harder. King Koopa also awaits at the end on a bridge and in the original 8-bit game there was not a boss battle theme, it was just this; Super Mario All-Stars brings a specific boss battle theme for the encounters.

It is only at the last castle where the underwater theme shares space with this one.

The melody is made mostly of chromatic notes and the biggest jump is unsurprisingly the tritone note. Also contrasting with the Ground Theme, which is all about syncopation, this one has its melody fall on the downbeats like a stomping giant turtle. Meanwhile, the upper voice arpeggio is off beat.

Curiously, it seems Kondo did not take a liking to make the castle themes this short since on Super Mario World the castles actually have the longest cue.

The notes of the original arpeggios are so difficult to discern that arranger Soyo Oka, who was in charge of updating this track for the SNES, did not even bother to make it an exact match as you can see and hear that the second bar of the cue uses a different chromatic pattern than the original, giving it a slightly different feel but nevertheless difficult to catch at those speeds. Who knows if this was an artistic choice or she simply didn’t get the right notes. Although somehow she still managed to include the usually cute music box samples which are turning out to be the main instrument of the Super Nintendo era Mario games; here they sound more Halloween like. She is also able to double the bass melody thanks to having additional channels to work with. Still, she does not modify the track that much by adding more textures to it.