Mario Clash (VB, 1995)

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

Credits

This game has neither a staff roll in-game nor a staff page in either the U.S. or Japanese manual. Both Ryoji Yoshitomi and Katsuya Yamano are listed as authors in the game’s copyright registration with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, but it’s not clear what their roles were or if there were other unlisted staff.

Info

Awww shit, we’ve finally reached the real reason I started this series. I didn’t want to talk about Ken Kojima[1], I didn’t want to talk about Galactic Pinball[2]. I wanted to talk about Ryoji fucking Yoshitomi. This one’s personal, so we’re gonna be here a while.

Yoshitomi is a sound designer/composer and one of the longest-tenured audio staff at the company, having been there by at least 1989, maybe even earlier. He’s never been super prolific but worked on some stuff here and there through the ’90s and early ’00s, mostly mobile Wario games but also random stuff like Metroid II and Mario Paint. He seems to have slowly transferred to a more managerial role in this millennium, with his last-known music credit being an arrangement for Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008 and last-known sound effects credit being Super Mario Maker in 2015; since then his credits have all been for “sound support” and “supervision,” whatever those mean.

Nintendo has always kept their staff on a bit of a leash as far as their public lives go, but even by the company’s standards, Yoshitomi is rather reclusive; as far as I know, he’s never been interviewed, never been profiled in a strategy guide or something, and never even had a photo publicly released. Allegedly we know he was born in Tokyo in 1964, but given how there is seemingly no information about him anywhere, I’m a little skeptical if that’s even a confirmed fact.

Despite all this, Yoshitomi is without a doubt the single person who has influenced the things I make the most, all time and from any field, largely through his audio for Metroid II and Wario Land 4. His work experiments with all aspects of music: its form, its function, its composition, its instrumentation, its implementation, its manipulation. He’s explored atonality and musique concrète-ishness to evoke alienness and isolation, realtime manipulation of music playback to evoke cartoonishness, using sound as music and music as sound, and more. He more than anyone else has made me think about the role of audio, what it can do it and how it can do it, which has in turn led to the random nonsense I fling at a wall whenever I start programming audio and therefore making everyone sorry.

And this is all at Nintendo, the funny billion dollar company that makes glossy video games for children. I kinda feel like a broken record sometimes talking about the insane and baffling music they’ve put out in the last five years or so, but this experimental streak has lived within the company for decades, going back at least as far as Yoshitomi. And that coexistence is honestly is one of the most inspiring things to me out there.

So aaaaaaaanyway, Mario Clash is a 3D update of the original Mario Bros. arcade game. The music is generally kinda quirky, a bit reminiscent of Wario Land but with sound programming a little more in line with Metroid II, so I’d bet that Yoshitomi was the audio person and Katsuya Yamano was in his usual programming job, rather than the extremely unlikely turn of events that programmer Yamano randomly composed two Virtual Boy games instead of just one. Goofy cartoon music that occasionally seems off and makes you go “wait, huh?” is I suppose Yoshitomi’s usual style, and that’s what you get here. Not a super challenging work as far as he goes, but enough interesting bits to keep me entertained.

Recommended tracks:

  • Important” is only a short jingle for the operation warning, but I just find the way the drum pattern falls apart at the very end to be super satisfying

  • Ice (Level 8)” throws wind noises into the song because why not

  • Skull (Level 9)” is rhythmically weird, starting off kind of in 7 but ambiguously formless before settling into a more straightforward 7 at 0:15, followed by a polymetric thing at 0:23 and then more 7 at 0:58; also that chime at 1:15 when the song loops is totally just from Metroid II right

  • Your Score” plays the same layer at two different speeds to a scintillating, morphing effect; this is a technique that Yoshitomi had used before

(track titles are unofficial)


  1. I did actually want to talk about Ken Kojima though. ↩︎

  2. I also did actually want to talk about Galactic Pinball though. ↩︎

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