Unpacking the Sounds of Earthbound’s Arcade

In between my original blog and this current project, my way of discussing video games was Singing Mountain, a podcast about video game music. It is *essentially* retired, though I still have a handful of episodes I need to post, including a proper finale. However, when I started this project, I knew I would eventually get back to writing about VGM again, and that day is apparently today.

In doing research for an upcoming post about the first-ever Nintendo crossovers, I realized something cool about the soundtrack to Earthbound, one of my all-time favorite games and one whose music seems to hold secrets and surprises even today. In watching footage of the Nintendo arcade title Sheriff, a shooter game released in 1979, I heard a sound effect — a simple video game jingle, really — that my brain registered as “This is a thing I know” even if it took me a full day to realize where I knew it from. The composition is heard when the purple condor goes flying across the top of the screen like the UFO did back in Space Invaders. In the below video, you hear it around the 1:30 mark.

It sounds familiar because it’s used as part of the noise landscape in the arcade area in Earthbound.

In the game, you can enter an arcade in the hero’s hometown, Onett, and the background music for this area is a “composed” version of diegetic video game noise. I always thought this was cool: a form of video game nostalgia sandwiched inside an actual video game at a time when that kind of thing was not so commonplace. Weirdly, it never occurred to me that the noises included in this track were themselves lifted from other games, even if the Earthbound soundtrack is famous for sampling from pop music in a way that made many people think of it as a sort of outlaw in the Nintendo canon. That turned out to not be the case, exactly, because Nintendo has since made the title readily available; you can now play it on Nintendo Switch Online, which presumably wouldn’t be possible if the game’s liberal use of samples had rendered it too legally problematic.

Researching around online, I’ve found a few theories as to where the rest of the arcade track may have come from. The Earthbound Wiki says some of it may be from the 1980 Nintendo arcade game Space Firebird. You can listen to this game in action in the below video (the sound starts just after the 2:00 mark. Try as I might, I cannot figure out what part of it I’m supposed to be hearing in the arcade track. Can you?

And this thread on the Starmen.net messageboards points out that another part of the arcade music seems to come directly from the 1982 shooter Xevious. They’re correct. You can hear this one plain and clear starting at the 1:56 mark.

Given that Xevious was a Namco game, it’s perhaps surprising that it would have been thrown into the mix as well. But if you know how loosely Earthbound’s composers played with samples, it’s less surprising, and even the fact that it comes from the version of Xevious released for the Famicom/NES wouldn’t fully explain how it wound up there.

It’s only a 31-second track, but I feel like it’s very possible there’s more classic video game music that got woven into the Onett arcade music. Given how rabid the Earthbound fandom can be, I kind of expected a timecode breakdown for which parts seem to come from which game, but it doesn’t look like one exists online. I want to right this wrong, and I suppose it would be a test of this still-small project to see if I could pool our collective knowledge of video game lore and see what we can identify. Are you down? Do you have an ear for VGM and think you can pick out something familiar in all this Noiseland noise? I’m all ears if so — on Twitter and on the contact page.

This offer stands until we identify every track. I will update this post with whatever I can find.

This post will probably be it for the week, as I’ve got to focus more time on my podcast, which is coming back from summer hiatus. But I do have a lot more planned for this site.

Miscellaneous Notes

Do we know who composed the music for Sheriff? A simple google search gets into the composer for “I Shot the Sheriff” fairly quickly, so I’m guessing we don’t, but as always, prove me wrong, internet.

The person credited with designing the characters — the sheriff and the damsel in distress — is Shigeru Miyamoto. Unless I am mistaken, they are the first Nintendo characters to be named and to have a distinct personalities, inasmuch as these crude assemblages of pixels can have personalities. Despite just being called Sheriff in Smash Bros., the character was named Mr. Jack in western localizations. The woman — Nintendo’s first female character even before Pauline in Donkey Kong — seems to have been named Betty in some localizations and Pretty Priscilla in Bandido, the 1980 Exidy version of the game.

High-quality shots of the original Nintendo cabinet art are hard to come by — and that’s a shame, because Nintendo art from this era is a beautiful thing to behold — but in this photo you can see that the damsel is clearly labeled Betty on the left side of the screen.

There’s an awesome-looking cabinet showcased in this video as well.

And on this page, an artist calling themselves udb23 is offering some awesome re-creations of the overlay decals, though not those showing off the character art on the sides of the screen. They truly look great, however.

The Nintendo nostalgia site Before Mario has a good look at the cocktail-style cabinet, which features different art.

In the Japanese flyer for Sheriff, the damsel in distress is simply identified as Lady (レディ), which also happens to be how Pauline was originally referred to in Japanese versions of Donkey Kong, although the extent to which Pauline can be considered the same character as the current Pauline is a matter of debate I will address in a future post. However, the flyer does make it seem like we could interpret the Sheriff character as a sort of predecessor for Pauline, in name and function.

If Betty/Lady is the first female character in a Nintendo game, then the second is apparently not Pauline, as I was surprised to learn: It’s Alarm Woman from the 1980 Game & Watch title Manhole. I… didn’t ever realize that the character was supposed to be a woman, but she is labeled as such in the instructions. Maybe it’s because that same bell seems to be the one Mr. Game & Watch wields in Smash Bros., so I just assumed it belonged to him originally?

Finally, this is actually not the only story I have about making a connection involving the Earthbound OST way after the fact. Back when I was making Singing Mountain, I did maybe my most personal episode in “Ric Ocasek in Moonside,” about a few things but focused on the theme to Moonside, a sort of alternate universe weirdo dimension that exists within in the game and does some very odd stuff with sampled pop music. It still weirds me out to think about, and I guess the takeaway is that the human brain is a marvelously strange machine that can surprise you in the connections it makes. If you want to listen to that episode, I’m embedding it here.

This episode concluded a series I did about the ways video game music intersects with a pop music, and how some stuff makes it into the final product despite all the legal provisions that say it shouldn’t. I was really proud of that series, and I’ll link to the rest here.

Miscellaneous Notes

How Popeye Changed Video Games

Super Mario Bros. 3 Happened Before Super Mario Bros. 2