Nintendo’s Super Mario theme is the first piece of music from a video game to be entered into the US Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.
The track is from 1985’s Super Mario Bros. game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. This was the moment Mario migrated from a side attraction in the 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game to the star of his own series.
Every year, 25 recordings considered to be culturally or historically important are entered into the National Recording Registry in the US.
The Super Mario theme by Koji Kondo is among the 2023 intake. Also included are tunes such as Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, and Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics.
As you can tell, these tracks have been given a while to brew before being allowed in. The newest recording is from 2012, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra.
Super Mario Bros. history
The Library of Congress described the game track as “probably the most recognisable in history,” on Twitter. It said this proved the “Nintendo sound chip was capable of vast musical complexity”.
“The amount of data that we could use for music and sound effects was extremely small,” composer Koji Kondo told the Library of Congress. “I really had to be very innovative and make full use of the musical and programming ingenuity that we had at the time.”
If you want to try the original game for yourself, it is available through the Nintendo Switch Online service.
Kondo turned 24 a month before the game’s original release in Japan. He still works for Nintendo in 2023, at the age of 61. He would compose another video game classic only a year later in 1986’s The Legend of Zelda, a theme that remains a mainstay of the series to this day.
Kondo is also credited in the recent The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which features versions of the original game’s music adapted by composer Brian Tyler.
The film broke records for the amount of money made by an animated feature up to the end of its opening weekend. It overtook Frozen 2 with £300 million in box office takings globally.
