The Indie Pop Legacy of Super Mario Land 2

This week’s Nintendo Direct featured news that a lot of gamers had been waiting for: that the company was putting to use its vast library of handheld games by making them available for the Nintendo Switch Online library. As of the end of the presentation on Wednesday, you could hop onto your Switch and start playing Game Boy and Game Boy Advance titles. This is a big deal in and of itself, but it also meant a lot of players could discover Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins — a very good Mario platforming game that has not been readily accessible in the way console Mario platformers have.

SML2 is famous for a few reasons, most notably because it introduced Wario, a character who immediately became an integral part of the Marioverse and who would shortly thereafter overtake the Mario Land games. Super Mario Land 3 was subtitled Wario Land, and then the sequel to that game just fully changed the franchise name to Wario Land, where it would refine and tweak platforming conventions to become a series that plays very differently to the mainline Mario games.

A star is born. Obviously.

Thirty years later, it’s hard to imagine a span in the Mario games when Wario wasn’t skulking around.

SML2 is also a pseudo-sequel to Super Mario World, moreso even than Yoshi’s Island, which sometimes bears the subtitle Super Mario World 2 even if the play mechanics are vastly different. Like the original Super Mario World, SML2 has the player traversing various themed areas via a map screen, and it’s very much so done in the style of Super Mario World’s map screen system than it is, say, the Super Mario Bros. 3 version of that. Mario’s sprite was also re-worked to approximate the Super Mario World one, more or less, just in a Game Boy scale, and even the Fire Flowers were re-designed to match the more tulip-looking form they had in Super Mario World than they had in other games.

Fire Flower evolution, left to right: Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario Land 2

One of many “zone” maps navigated to from a larger world map, Super Mario World-style. Also why isn’t Pumpkin Zone a track in a Mario Kart game already?

This post, however, is about a very strange legacy that SML2 has, and that is the fact that one of its music tracks was… re-purposed for a 2005 indie pop album. It’s not a cover, and it’s not a sample. I think I’d maybe term it an interpolation more than anything. Regardless of what it is, exactly, I really like it. I was over the moon — no pun intended — when I first heard it, and I’m bringing it up today because it’s a good example of the rather inconsistent way video game music gets recognized by the larger pop music machine.

One of the standout stages from SML2 has to be the one informally known as the Star Maze. It’s part of Space Zone, an area of the game where Mario dons an astronaut suit and goes bounding through some low-gravity environments. The Star Maze is one of these, and also it features background music not heard in any other stage. It’s catchy as hell.

Here’s a video of the stage, music an all, cut from this longplay video by xRavenXP.

The background music is actually a tune that gets hinted at in the map screen music for Space Zone, almost like it’s priming you to experience this composition in its upbeat dancepop glory.

In 2005, the Canadian musician Owen Pallett released their first album, Has a Good Home, under the solo project name Final Fantasy. The thirteenth track on this album, confusingly, is titled “An Arrow in the Side of Final Fantasy” and combines the original Star Maze melody with new lyrics.

Drought’s been hard
The cows are all slaughtered
But my love for you needs no water
You miss your youth
And you miss the city
But have no regrets, have no pity
Smoke blows thick
And turns midday to midnight
But my love for you needs no sunlight
Don’t be saddened
Just look around, love
All things shining! All things shining!

Reading the lyrics, I can spot no relation to the source material save for the final line, which might be a reference to the fact that the Star Maze level has Mario navigating around glowing stars. The fact that these, unlike most stars in Mario games, are hostile and will hurt you if you touch them perhaps twists those final lyrics into something less positive than they’d seem on first read-through.

The album’s liner notes acknowledge the connection to SML2, though in an oblique way. The text states that the song is “largely based on a melody from the game Six Golden Coins.” 

This is weird for two reasons. For one, it does not mention Nintendo or Super Mario, referring to the game only by its subtitle, which is not how anyone would ever shorthand it if you wanted people to know what you’re talking about. For another, it doesn’t reference Kazumi Totaka, who composed the music for SML2. I’ve never been able to get to the bottom of how this SML2 track ended up getting credited in this strange way. As it stands now, its existence would seem to conflict with how pop music usually acknowledges this kind of thing as a result of an infamous 1994 ruling. 

To offer a very brief summary, the rise of hop-hop in the early 90s ultimately resulted in a significant change in the way samples and interpolations work, legally speaking. Biz Markie’s 1991 album I Need a Haircut featured a track “Alone Again,” which featured a sample from Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 song “Alone Again (Naturally).” O’Sullivan sued, and when the judge ruled in his favor, the mainstream recording industry moved forward requiring samples to be cleared by all the parties that own the rights to the original works. It was bad for creative expression in general, it was especially bad for a sample-heavy genre like hip-hop, and there’s a pretty obvious read here for one sort of creative person seeing theft in what another would see as homage and creative interplay. But as a result, you can fairly easily find documentation about how new work reinterprets existing work — if not in the liner notes, then in the websites for ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast  Music, Incorporated).

Things do squeak by occasionally, and there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large, pop music does not seem to treat samples and interpolations from video games the same way. So what gives?

Well, looking at the Star Maze song and the way Pallett acknowledges the inspiration, I am tempted to say that this could be a result of Pallett being an indie pop star working in the mid-2000s. Quirky is as quirky does, after all, and then there’s also the matter of a certain shame about video game music that Pallett admitted to having, at least back in the day. There’s a message board where a fan asked Pallett about the track back in 2006. Pallett responded, but either misremembered the liner notes or was referring to a different printing than the one I bought, saying,

Well, my fine friend, if you look inside the liner notes of your copy of HAGH you would find the composer of Marlo Land 2 was acknowledged. It was my favourite piece of video game music when I was 12 and I put it on mix CDs. Embarassed that the recipient might find out that the song was from a video game, I would credit the song to the fictional band “Chuck,” and called in “Mario In Space.”

But regardless, it seems like at one point in his career, Pallett wanted to hide the fact that he was really into music from a Super Mario game. Maybe the liner notes refer to SML2 just as “Six Golden Coins” for similar reasons? Either way, the composer is not acknowledged, despite Pallett’s statement to the contrary.

This all could have something to do with the fact Pallett’s first two albums were released by an indie-focused Canadian musician co-op sometimes called Blocks Recording Club but apparently officially known just as □□□□□□, or six block characters in a row. My copy of Has a Good Home, at least, was released by Tomlab, a German indie label that has been associated with Blocks Recording Club. I feel like both of these entities might not be inclined to document samples or interpolations the way bigger labels do in the U.S. After all, they allowed Pallett to release their first albums with the stage name Final Fantasy, despite the fact that it’s likely a copyrighted brand name even out of the context of video games, to say nothing of it making for poor search optimization. (Pallett released He Poos Clouds in 2006 as Final Fantasy and then all subsequent work under their given name.)

I bring all this up because I’m seeing a lot of people posting on Twitter this morning about how they are discovering Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins and enjoying it, and I figured they’d also enjoy this neat little indie pop asterisk that I can attach to it. They might even have encountered Pallett’s work previously, as he has collaborated on each of Arcade Fire’s studio albums, for example, and it might be surprising to learn that this accomplished musician also has a deep love for video games. (I talk about some of the other ways Pallett has incorporated VGM into their work in the miscellaneous notes section, BTW.)

I’ve got a second motivation for posting this today, however, and that’s this: Of all the issues related to video games in the context of a larger cultural universe, the way video games interact with pop music has always confounded me. Incomplete though Pallett’s acknowledgement might be, it’s still more than most artists do when lifting, interpreting or in some other way using video game music in their work. And perhaps if I post here, someone can explain to me why.

There’s an instance I often point to in the same breath as Pallett’s video game-adjacent work, and that is the 2002 Boom Bip track “Roads Must Roll.” (I associate the two because they’re both mid-2000s indie pop, and back in my day, I saw both Boom Bip and Arcade Fire perform at different Coachellas. Yes, I really did just date myself.) See if you can spot the piece of VGM that is being reworked in this Boom Bip track. 

About twenty seconds in, the track seems to be reworking the title theme to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

To be specific, the original Akito Nakatsuka composition is arriving in the Boom Bip track via the medley track from 1999’s live orchestral album Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Hyrule Symphony. I am certain of this, because I have ears and a brain. It’s so clear, in fact, that in at least one instance, it fooled the YouTube algorithm, with this posting of the medley track incorrectly citing it as featuring the Boom Bip track, rather than the other way around. But there’s nothing in the liner notes of this album crediting anyone other than Bryan Hollon with writing the songs — and, more tellingly, there’s no mention of Nakatsuka, Zelda or Nintendo in the listings offered by the two organizations where you’d go to find this kind of thing: ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast  Music, Incorporated).

Which seems weird, given how comprehensive the music industry has tried to be in the wake of that Biz Markie lawsuit, not necessarily out of obligation to acknowledge artistic enterprise so much as a desire not to be sued. Despite having looked into these sorts of matters many times, I can only conclude that either there is something fundamental to the interplay between video games and pop music that I don’t understand or that for some specific reason, video game music exists in a different legal sphere than other compositions, though I wouldn’t be able to guess why. No music professionals I’ve ever interviewed about this has been able to tell me either.

My personal holy grail in all this lies not with Owen Pallett or Super Mario Land 2 but with Janet Jackson and Legend of Mana, as there exists a strange relationship between these two that I have never been able to explain.

Hear me out on this one.

In 2001, Janet Jackson released her album All for You, which features the track “China Love,” which contains a sample from Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack to Legend of Mana. Here’s Janet’s track.

And here’s the Legend of Mana track, which is variously titled “Moonlight City Lumina” or “Moonlit City Roa,” depending on whether you’re going by the English tracklist or the Japanese one.

The Legend of Mana track is pitched up slightly, but I’m certain that this is the sample looped throughout Janet’s track. For the life of me, however, I cannot figure out why it’s not acknowledged anywhere. Per the standards implemented after the Biz Markie lawsuit, it really seems like the label that released All for You, Virgin Records, would have to say where the sample came from. It doesn’t. And even if the people producing the album brought in musicians to re-create the sample, they still would have to say so. 

I had a look at the liner notes for this album, and it indicates that four of the tracks owe debts to previously existing compositions: the title track, which samples the Italian disco band Change; “Son of a Gun,” which contains “resung elements” from Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”; “Truth,” which contains “resung elements” from the Five Stairsteps song “Ooh Child”; and finally “Someone to Call My Love,” which features “replayed elements” from the song “Ventura Highway” by the band America. I can’t imagine how bringing in musicians to replay this section of the Legend of Mana song would constitute anything other than the same “replayed elements” like with that America song. 

Neither Yoko Shimomura nor Squaresoft are listed as having anything to do with “China Love,” but “Son of a Gun” lists Carly Simon as a writer, even though she wasn’t actively involved in the production of the track. She’s listed because the track samples “You’re So Vain,” which she wrote.

If you know what’s going on here, hit me up.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, both ASCAP and BMI know that Yoko Shimomura exists.

In the end, the Owen Pallett song is actually the outlier, in that it acknowledges the video game connection, at least to an extent. I am also maybe biased, though, because I unabashedly love what Pallett did with this piece of video game music, which I’ve liked since the day I first played through the Star Maze stage. In fact, until I heard Pallett’s take on it, I didn’t know anyone else had noticed. 

This is a subject I hope to revisit on this site. Whenever musicians value video game music by incorporating it into something separate from that original context, it elevates that game. But every time I look into one of these situations, it also gets me thinking about the larger issues at play, which I’m exploring with every post here: the weird ways video games exist separate from and as a part of the larger world around them.

Miscellaneous Notes

One of the reasons Pallett’s work spoke to me was that his songs referenced video game culture in an artful way and sometimes even did so in the context of being gay. The title track to He Poos Clouds, for example features the following lyrics:

Lazy, you lazy poet, your words are reckless, and I can't feel it
But hey, hey, all the boys I have ever loved have been digital
I've been a guest, on a screen, or in a book!
I move 'em with my thumbs, I move them with my thumbs
I write his name in nothing, he whispers to the author
That I will be the only one

Later in the song, the lyrics seem to be riffing on Link from Legend of Zelda, sometimes directly, with references to Shadow Link and the secret seashells in Link’s Awakening.

Gotta fulfill the seven prophecies!
Gotta be a friend to grandmother!
Gotta rescue Michael from the White Witch!
Gotta find and kill my shadow self
Gotta dig up every secret seashell

There’s also the track “Hey Dad,” which seems like it’s riffing on the Coin Heaven theme from Super Mario Bros., though Pallett has explained on his message board that as he sees it, his melody and the Coin Heaven melody are both riffing on the the song “Brazil,” which most people know from its use in the movie of the same name.

Separate from the music, the Star Maze stage is also notable because the boss fought at the end of it is someone who looks a hell of a lot like Tatanga, the big bad from the first Super Mario Land game. The game itself does not identify them as one in the same, however, and the closest we get to any acknowledgement of two games being related comes in the English version of the Super Mario Land 2 instruction manual. According to this text, Wario rises to power specifically during the events of the first Super Mario Land, when Mario was rescuing Daisy from Tatanga. 

According to the 1994 Shogakukan guide to Mario characters, Tatanga shows up in Mario Land 2 to get revenge on Mario for having beaten him previously. Make of that what you will. But if they didn’t want us to think it was the same villainous alien, they could have done more to draw them differently, right?

EDIT: Actually, this tweet pointed out to me that the Japanese website for Super Mario Land 2 confirms that the character is Tatanga. Those are the katakana for his name.

Speaking of subtitles, the Wario Land games each have one, and I’m sorry they didn’t make it outside Japan, because they’re a lot of fun. In Japan, Wario Land II is Nusumareta Zaihō or “The Stolen Treasure.” Wario Land 3 is Fushigi na Orugōru, or “The Mysterious Music Box.” (EDIT: An earlier version of this post had orugōru (オルゴール) meaning “organ,” but that was inaccurate. As it was pointed out here, in Japanese, it means specifically “music box,” although it comes from a Germanic word meaning “organ” if not specifically the Dutch orgel.) Finally, Wario Land 4 gets the subtite Yōki no Otakara, “Treasure of the Yōki,” with that last word being the Japanese name for the title’s big bad, the evocatively named Golden Diva.

This post draws from a few episodes I did on my VGM podcast Singing Mountain about pop music and video games — mostly from the one I called “Link and Mario Go to Coachella,” which you can listen to here. I also did one about how Pixies covered the theme to N.A.R.C. and even titled it as such. For this one, I interviewed Brian Schmidt, who composed the game’s soundtrack, and he explained that the record label made a deal with Williams Electronics so that he would get a writing credit for it. This makes a difference on a monetary level. The video game company owns the mechanical rights to the song, which is to say who gets paid when the album is purchased or the track purchased. However, the performance rights — when it’s played in concert or used in a movie — gets split 50-50 between Williams and Schmidt. That payment is much, Schmidt told me, but it’s not nothing — and more than a lot of video game composers seem to get when their music gets sampled or otherwise reworked.