Today sees both the OG Mario Party and its successor, Mario Party 2, land on the Switch thanks to the NSO Expansion Pass, and this has led to a certain amount of reminiscing from the games’ developers.
One such peek into the past comes courtesy of Mario Party composer Yasunori Mitsuda (thanks, @gosokkyufor the translation). Tweeting his memories of working on the original game, Mitsuda revealed that a disagreement over what constitutes ‘jazz’ caused around 200 songs to be scrapped from the original soundtrack.
According to Mitsuda’s above tweets, the composer initially struggled to get to grips with director Kenji Kikuchi’s vision for the Mario Party soundtrack, producing a huge number of rejected ‘jazz’ tracks (as guided) before discovering that the director was actually after ‘big band jazz’ – don’t you just hate it when that happens!
This resulted in a record-breaking number (in Mitsuda’s career, at least) of 200 songs needing to be scrapped from the game’s soundtrack – talk about not understanding the assignment. Fortunately the composer is yet to top this total.
Of course, the resulting soundtrack ended up as a certified banger with influences from carnival music, original Mario motifs and, yes, big band jazz. We’ve thrown in the full mix courtesy of EXTREME YouTube Gaming Channel for your hearing pleasure down below.
Was it worth the removal of 200 tracks before it? We guess that we’ll need to hear ‘Mario Party: The Mitsuda Cut’ to find out…
Will you be playing Mario Party and Mario Party 2 today? Roll and move into the comments to let us know!
