Game info: Wikipedia, website
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube
Credits
Staff roll:
Audio Lead: James Phillipsen
Audio: Eric Pansulla, Ina Almacen
Music Production by Schwedbeast Studios LLC: Lawrence Schwedler, Bruce Stark, David Kitay, Tacket Brown, Greg Dixon
Musicians: Nayoung Ham, John Kim, Eric Likkel, Pat Nelson, Stephen O’Bent, Carey Rayburn, Brian Schmidt, Brian Shaw
Sound Supervisors: Takahiro Watanabe, Mahito Yokota
DigiPen staff credits:
Lawrence Schwedler: Music Director
Bruce Stark: Composition, Arrangement
Tacket Brown: Audio Producer
Eric Likkel: Saxophone, Clarinet
Nayoung Ham: Flute
John Kim: Violin
Carey Rayburn: Trumpet
Brian Shaw: Trumpet
Stephen O’Bent: Trombone
Pat Nelson: Bassoon, Contrabassoon
Brian Schmidt: Electric Bass
Greg Dixon: Cinematic Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering
Info
For the Switch remake, NST reached out to original composer Lawrence Schwedler to see about doing the new soundtrack. In a decently long news post accompanied by a nearly fifteen minute interview video, he explained that he decided to get his fellow DigiPen instructional staff on board, chiefly department chair Bruce Stark to do the arrangement and new composition given his background as a jazz musician and concert music composer. A former DigiPen instructor, David Kitay, was also brought on to handle cutscene music. (Schwedler seemingly didn’t write anything for the remake himself.)
The music direction for the remake was for the music to be for acoustic jazz band, and since the original soundtrack was already kinda written for that, Stark’s arrangements stick pretty close to the originals. The main point of departure is that many tracks are extended, presenting the original material and then “[letting] the band keep playing, maybe having some solos in the instruments,” a pretty typical jazz approach. Some of the less jazzy tracks were also rearranged more dramatically to fit the overall jazz band approach, particularly the boss themes. There’s also a decent amount of new compositions: notably, the remake added two new worlds so each of those has new songs, and there are three new world boss themes so none of them are reused like they are in the original.
The straightforward arrangements are more or less fine, but since I didn’t care for the original music all that much, they don’t do a whole lot for me either. I did think a lot of the expanded material was nice though, they add some harmonic variance, cool compositional moments, and fun solos.
Recommended tracks:
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“Mario Toy Company BOSS” adds a new section at 1:03 with a pseudo-polymetric bass playing in eighth triplets to make following the rhythm tricky
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“Donkey Kong Jungle B” is sedate with a little bit of spice and hits some nice piano chords in the solo section, particularly the one at 1:32
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“Spooky House B” I’m mainly including because I included the original in my post about the original game, so you have an example of the arrangement approach
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“Ice World A” is from one of the two new worlds added to the remake and starts off with the slowest bar chime slide I’ve ever heard in a piece of music
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“Mystic Forest BOSS” waters down the cool progness of the original track a little bit in my opinion, but also adds a really cool prog piano bit at 1:06
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“Twilight City B” departs really heavily from the original, like all the themes from this world do for some reason; as an original noir jazz theme it’s pretty nice
(track titles are taken from the filenames)
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