The Great Experiment

Originally composed by Takane Okubo from Sim Earth for the Super NES.


Sim Earth is a Maxis game like most others where you are God and you create the world within a certain scope. You had Sim City, you had Sim Ant, and here’s Sim EARTH which, at the time, was mind blowing because the game tasked the player with developing entire planets. This involved deciding on the size, age, axis orientation, and other factors of your planet along with how the geology of the planet worked and what degree of which processes were found in the atmosphere. You could eventually create water, life, and even watch civilizations rise up or destroy them all with a meteor.

That was if you wanted to start from scratch. Otherwise, you could choose to begin with planets at different timescales such as the dawn of life, or the dawn of technology, or just a planet completely covered in water. Each of these types of worlds had their own music and, having found myself liking a great many of them, thought I should go ahead and cover a few.

I started with what I felt would be a nice sound-of-empty-space sort of music for the beginning as there would be a vast nothing before one started cultivating their world, right? Sort of the ambient soundtrack to a stellar nursery. Next is a very desolate sounding bit for a desolate planet. This is music from an empty random planet mode I believe. Once this all settles into its groove, the sounds of animals like birds and such can be heard and this represents the majestic flourishing of life on the planet. These sounds then usher in the final theme from the game, the song which plays as a significant event changes the planet. It’s a happy end to a great experiment on a planetary level.

Frappe Holidays

Originally composed by Kenta Nagata from Mario Kart 64 for the Nintedo 64.


In the winter of 2007, the idea to form a Metroid Metal members-made Christmas album was thrown around and this was my contribution. It’s the stage music to “Frappe Snowland” from Mario Kart 64 which is an ice level populated by enormous, hostile penguins. So there you go. Frappe Holidays, car engines, and penguin sounds.

Go, Epona, Go!

Originally composed by Toru Minegishi, Asuka Ohta, and Koji Kondo from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Nintendo Wii.


Sometimes I think to myself, “Make it jazz!” I don’t listen to jazz and am not at all proficient as a jazz musician, but I rather like my own impression of what jazz music is and thought this one should be done in that style. I can’t say the flute has ever been my favorite instrument, but it somehow really shines when in the context of a jazz band and that’s the main reason I chose it. Also, I like that it has those old, foresty associations. When I think of flutes, I usually think of hobbits in marching bands anyway.

Marshmallow

Originally composed by Rich Vreeland from The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage.


Rich Vreeland is this monster whose music I was introduced to on the Metroid Metal message boards. It was (and still is) music unlike anything else ever, and it’s extremely good and extremely clever and we used to bounce ideas off of each other all the time. The original version of this song is called “Martianmallow Town” from his album, The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage which is the soundtrack to an imaginary game of his. I loved it when I heard it but couldn’t help hearing it differently in my memory and figured I’d might as well record it the way I remembered it. I asked his permission and not only did he give me the go ahead, he sent me his actual song files to play with. I don’t recall expecting an open-source angle into the song, but how generous!

In retrospect, I think I took his unique music and made it more conventional sounding than anything else. I intended to evoke the energy of live musicians. Classic Motown recordings have that quality to them where you can almost hear the room itself and I had a feeling that a sound like that might be right for what I wanted to do. Rich programmed the original instruments himself using his own peculiar methods, and much of this data is what I imported to use as I wished. In essence, this song has been re-produced rather than performed entirely myself, and the personality of the music is still very much his own as a result. It was plenty good to begin with so I honestly didn’t see the need to try and copy what he’d already done. As I said, open source!

Please visit Rich's site: disasterpeace.com !!

Attainment Suite

This is one of my own original concoctions.


My goal was to take a set of motifs and styles through an emotional journey based loosely on the Kübler-Ross model of coping with grief (skipping over the first stage because, musically, “denial” really wouldn’t fit). Many artists prefer to leave their work open to interpretation, but I know that really, everyone wants to know what the artists themselves meant or felt about something they’ve made. So the explanation above is, in my own view, what’s going on. Naturally, I still encourage anyone to make of this work what they will (within the rules outlined by the Creative Commons license of course!).

Norfair and Title Themes

Originally composed by Hirokazu Tanaka from Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System.


Game music, for all its variety and breadth of styles, is more often than not re-arranged by fans for guitar because, I imagine, that’s simply the instrument of choice as it has been the most commonly used instrument in popular music for over fifty years now. And of the children who played Metroid when it was new and have now grown into music-creating adults, many of them naturally do so with their guitars.

By virtue of not being a guitarist, any cover coming from me was surely going to be approached very differently. Rock and metal have become the most common styles used for video game covers, and one could do no better than Stemage’s amazing examples of this at Metroid Metal. However, as wonderfully as metal and game music apparently fit together, I’ve personally never thought of Metroid as being very “metal” at all and wanted to use some of the eerie, sci-fi elements of the game and its positively dense atmosphere to influence the sound of my mix and thus ended up taking it in a direction closer to what I thought that would sound like.

Title and Village Themes

Originally composed by Naofumi Hataya from Golden Axe II for the Sega Genesis.


Like all of the game music I cover, I chose these themes because I really enjoy listening to them and wanted to learn how they worked in the way that a curious tinkerer disassembles and reassembles a gadget to understand it. I also wanted to hear the music again for the first time as well as apply my own ideas and creativity to these already great pieces as both a tribute to them and as a challenge to rise to their level of awesomeness. If my versions are inferior to the originals, then I’ve failed in that respect, but still learned a great deal just the same. I’m definitely more than happy if my versions are on at least the same level as the originals though.

The Village is the theme to the first stage of the Sega Genesis game after the introductory story (from which the music at the beginning comes from, obviously) which takes place in a village. This presumably peaceful place has been overrun by raiders and evil minions and it’s the job of the player to drive them out in a 2D sidescrolling brawler format.