Mario’s Tennis (VB, 1995)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube (single video)

Credits

Sound Composer: Hitoshi Fukushima, Morihiro Iwamoto

Info

I started reading the book version of Jeremy Parish’s Virtual Boy Works series of videos, and I decided it would be really funny if I listened to every single Virtual Boy soundtrack (many being relistens). As a bit, you see. Ages ago it used to be really problematic to listen to VB music because there were only good quality, complete rips of like two games, but several years ago VB support was added to the VGM audio logging format, so now it’s possible to pretty easily listen to 16 out of the 22 officially-released games for the system, as well as 1 that wasn’t (Bound High!). The music situation for the other 6 is somewhat problematic, ranging from mostly ripped to not at all ripped, so we’ll see how far I commit to the bit by consulting gameplay videos or whatever.

The Virtual Boy was Nintendo’s only major foray into wavetable synthesis, so the audio sounds a bit different from the NES and Game Boy (though the GB did have one wavetable channel). Those two systems used programmable sound generators, or PSGs, which are audio chips that define a set of specific waveforms you can use and manipulate, like square waves and triangle waves and the like. Wavetable synthesis is more general in that you can supply the waveform itself: you provide a small list of numerical values (called samples, in the digital signal processing sense) which the chip then repeats to form the basic waveform for that channel, and then you can manipulate the pitch and volume and what have you. So if you want a square wave you can just load up samples to define a square wave, or you can get really in there and make up some sounds that can’t easily be replicated by a standard PSG. The TurboGrafx-16 is the main game console that used wavetable synthesis for its music, so you may notice that Virtual Boy music sounds a bit similar timbrally.

Mario’s Tennis was apparently co-developed by TOSE, so the game’s audio staff come from there, not Nintendo. Hitoshi Fukushima shows up in only a couple of other games in the ’90s and so is a big unknown, though TOSE staff frequently used aliases around this time, so it’s possible he worked on other games under a name we haven’t deciphered yet. Morihiro Iwamoto, on the other hand, had a pretty good career there, working on a bunch of Bomberman games no one talks about and, more importantly, being the primary (potentially only, the first game’s status is ambiguous) composer of the Legendary Starfy series, before going to teach at a university for a few years and then starting a drone photography company.

This soundtrack has a decent amount of tunes for a launch title sports game, with an entire eight different gameplay themes for different modes, alongside various jingles and menu themes and ending themes and so on so forth. The music’s pretty basic, very peppy/upbeat stuff that’s heavy on the cute with a bit of jazz flavor. A number of the tunes definitely have a sports vibe so I think you’d be able to guess this was a sports game just from the soundtrack alone, though I think it’s a bit too cutesy for me to have clocked as coming from a Mario game specifically. Maybe that’s just because I still think all the time about the interview with Mahito Yokota where he recounted Koji Kondo saying that Mario is cool, not cute.

Recommended tracks:

  • Doubles 1” gets down at 0:48

  • Tournament Singles 1” is definitely obliquely referencing the Super Mario Bros. main theme at 0:11 right, that’s not just me right

  • Character Select (Hard Mode)” has this fun repeated gunshot sound at the start of most measures and a nice little break with a metric modulation at 0:24

(track titles are unofficial)

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