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Mario Bros. Arcade
Enter Shigeru Miyamoto's "jump man", Mario, and his brother Luigi. Two italian plumbers battling evil monsters. This was initially released on the Arcade system, and was later re-released to all Nintendo home consoles, as well as some Atari. It had the 8-bit Zilog Z80 as it's CPU. The sound consisted of samples, with an unknown composer. The sounds were very simple, being that the Arcade system didn't have the storarge or the power to harbor large sound files. -
NES RELEASED
The NES board supported a total of five sound channels. These included two pulse wave channels of variable duty cycle (12.5%, 25%, 50% and 75%), with a volume control of sixteen levels and hardware pitch bending supporting frequencies ranging from 54 Hz to 28 kHz. Additional channels included one fixed-volume triangle wave channel supporting frequencies from 27 Hz to 56 kHz, one sixteen-volume level white noise channel supporting two modes. The DPCM channel registered a 6-bit resolution in sound -
Super Mario Bros.
First Mario game for the NES- which became an instant classic. He was established as a character, his world was created, and the sounds within became iconic. Composer Koji Kondo, who created many nintendo game theme songs, wrote Super Mario's theme and other tracks on the game. He collaborated with Shigeru Miyamoto to create rhymthic, thematic songs that reflected Mario's world and the experience. -
Super Mario 2
Koji Kondo lead the composing for Super Mario Bros. 2 for the NES. This game was only released in Japan, and was not recieved like the first game. Koji became more intuned with Shigeru and Mario, which would prove to be a pivotal collaboration -
Super Mario 3
Koji Kondo was chosen for the second time to compose for Mario Bros 3 for the NES. The intention behind the music was to make long, rhythmic and interesting loops that could be played over and over without the user becoming bored. He succeeded. -
Super Mario World
Koji Kondo returned as primary composer for Super Mario World on the SNES, this time using only an electric keyboard. He began encoporating new elements, more textured sounds, better music, with a higher resolution due to the advanced 16-bit Super Nintendo. -
SUPER NES
The Super NES ran a Sony DSP processor that was a 16-bit format with 8 channels. It had a 32 kHz 16-bit audio output. It took 64 kB of RAM. -
Super Mario 64
Of course, Koji Kondo composed for Super Mario 64 for the N64. He created new approaches on old songs, wrote new material, and worked with Charles Martinet(Mario) , Leslie Swan(Peach), Isacc Marshal(Bowser) for sound bytes. -
N64 released
Nintendo releases the 64-bit 3-D emulating home consol. The audio was controlled by a 64-bit SGI co-processor, know as the "reality signal processor". It could play PCM, MP3, MIDI and tracker music. The RSP was capable of playing up to 100 channels. It's max sampling rate was 48 kHz of 16-bit audio. The total memory used by the audio was 4 MB. -
Nintendo Wii
The Wii runs a IBM Power based PC for it's CPU. It has 512 MB storage -
Super Mario Galaxy
The compostion for Super Mario Galaxy came from the team of Koji Kondo, Mahito Yokota, and Yoshiaki Koizumi. Kondo composed 4 pieces, and Yokota the rest while Kozumi oversaw. The sound track includes a 50 piece orchestra, real instruments and synthesizers. It was a hit on the Wii platform.