Software info: Nintendo Wiki
Listening: YouTube (tracks 2-3 in this playlist; missing all event jingles)
Credits
This software has no credits, but Hiroki Morishita is listed as one of the authors in its copyright registration with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. It’s possible there were other audio staff who weren’t included in the registration, but given the extremely small scale of the app, this seems pretty unlikely.
Info
The Canadian Intellectual Property Office—which manages copyrights, trademarks, patents, all that stuff—maintains publicly accessible databases which can be used to search all the stuff they have registered. This includes a number of video games (for which there’s no real rhyme or reason in what’s there and what isn’t), and while this isn’t terribly useful in most cases since video games these days have staff rolls and all, it has been useful in identifying the real names of people who were only credited with a fake name in-game and some of the staff who worked on things without credits at all.
I don’t remember exactly what I was searching (possibly I was just skimming through all of Nintendo’s registrations), but one day years ago I was randomly searching stuff in the copyright database, when I found the entry for Nintendo Countdown Calendar. I had never heard of this, and there were no videos of it on YouTube. Mysterious! But one of the listed authors was Hiroki Morishita, and if you were around when I read his name you would’ve heard a loud record scratch sound, because Morishita is an incredibly good composer that I love a lot. He works for INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS and is best known for his work on modern Fire Emblem games. Loves big jazzy harmonies, weird rhythms, and prog outbursts in his very serious orchestral music.
Naturally, I immediately pulled up the app in the 3DS eShop, since you can buy DSi software on the 3DS too (until next month, when it closes!), pulled up the preview video which contained 20 seconds of the main BGM, and said “this does kind of sound like Morishita if he was trying to be cute.” Then I impulsively bought it for $1.99 so I could hear the whole track. Then I made a shit-ass recording with my phone earbuds so I could listen to it on my computer. But you don’t have to do that, because since then it’s actually been ripped properly!
So all that was filler, because this is just a calendar app with one piece of BGM (which is only a loop of a bit over a minute) and then a few jingles for startup and events/announcements, so there’s very little to say about this otherwise. But the main theme is good and some of the jingles are fun.
Recommended track:
- “Main Theme” is a very chill jazz number that might get you in the mood of Animal Crossing
(track title is unofficial)
Leave a Reply