All Your Video Game Music Were Belong To Me

One of the things I did while I was on vacation last week was find myself a piano. I used to think practicing was a chore; now I think playing a piano is a treat. You know, like ice cream. ^__^

One of the things I used to do when I was a kid, before YouTube and before Martin Leung made it cool, was play video game music, by ear, on the piano. Those of you who know me know I loved my SNES way way way too much, and beat Chrono Trigger the requisite 11 times. But (sigh) back in 1995 I had no video camera and no internets on which to share my musical genius.

So there I was, at this piano, with my laptop nearby, and I thought "well, it's my turn now."

I did a rough cut of the SMB theme to start, then made some adjustments with my camera and with the audio levels and punched out the following tunes, all from memory, all by ear:

• Legend of Zelda main theme
• Final Fantasy VI Battle Victory
• Bubble Bobble main theme
• Yoshi's Theme (Yoshi's Tetris)
• Costa Del Sol (Final Fantasy VII)
• Celes' Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Locke's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Celes' and Locke's Themes simultaneously (LH/RH)
• Mog's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Kefka's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Faxanadu Overworld Theme (that one is hard, yo)
• Final Fantasy main theme
• Frog's Theme (Chrono Trigger)
• Super Mario Bros 2 End Theme (you know, the one that Brentalfloss sings)
• Super Mario Bros 3 Overworld Theme (A)
• Strago's Theme (Final Fantasy VI)
• Super Mario Bros 3 Overworld Theme (B)

Ah, but here's the sad part. At the end of my hour-long playing marathon, my computer told me that I was running out of memory on my hard drive. (I would have kept going but the video camera actually, itself, stopped. It's a shame, too. There were nine other Final Fantasy VI character themes I could have played.)

So, because it was running out of memory, I dumped everything into Windows Movie Maker and edited it up to perfection.

And then I deleted the original file to save my computer memories.

And then I learned that--even though I had saved the edited movie on WMM--deleting the original file deleted the edited files, too. (The edited files needed to "access the source files" to play, apparently.)

So all I had left to show for my afternoon was the rough cut of SMB, complete with fuzzy audio.

I guess that's okay, though. I'm sure y'all would rather listen to three minutes of music than to an entire hour.

ConGRADulations! (Watch out for the mushrooms of death!)

Getting a terminal degree is kinda like playing Super Mario Bros (the First).

You have to jump over things and hide from things and evade things, and the end boss is a rehash of every level you've played up to that point (including the water level -- I always hated the water levels).

And then when you're done, you're all "Yay! I beat a really long game during an era where game cartridges didn't have save states!" and you wait for your reward... but all you get is one screenshot of Mario and the Princess and then BAM! You're back again at level 1.1, with no coins or power-ups, only this time there are twice as many enemies and some question blocks pop out mushrooms of death.

Woo-hoo!