Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Audio Director / Music: Lawrence Schwedler
Additional Audio Support: James Phillipsen
Advisor: Koji Kondo
Info
Lawrence Schwedler was previously an audio director at Nintendo Software Technology (NST), a subsidiary of Nintendo in Redmond, Washington, where he worked on almost all of their projects over a period of 13 years before leaving in 2012. He moved on over to DigiPen, a gamedev university which funnels graduates back into NST (such as Eric Pansulla, whose work I’ve possibly featured here before), where he directs all of their audio programs.
In 2004 he wrote the soundtrack to Mario vs. Donkey Kong, a 2D puzzle platformer where you have a bunch of Mario-style athletic moves at your disposal to make it through levels. The music is generally some pretty swingy, slinky jazz, with lots of vibraphone, organ, winds, bass, and drums. The dominant vibe is chill, though some of the stage themes and all of the boss themes understandably get more tense, because this is an action game after all. The sound quality is pretty much fine for GBA audio, a mix of pretty simple-sounding sampled instruments with synthier ones and some of that classic GBA cronch.
I’m pretty lukewarm on this soundtrack as a whole; I don’t care all that much about this style of jazz and most of the tracks didn’t otherwise do much that interested me. I do inherently like the sound of GBA audio, though, so I always find this kind of stuff fun to listen to, and some of my favorites were the less jazzier tracks that get to flex a little more creative audio design.
Recommended tracks:
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“Title” sets the original Mario 1-1 theme against the original NES Donkey Kong opening theme, which is cool
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“2nd Fight With Donkey Kong (& 5th Fight)” is some weird boss battle prog
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“Spooky House II” was my favorite of the normal jazz themes
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“Mystic Forest I” hits some real deep frequencies at 0:30 with the drumloop, sounds great for the GBA
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“Mystic Forest II” is your regularly scheduled whole tone piece
(track titles are unofficial)
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