Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

Some of you may be aware that a number of years ago, I dabbled in rearranging melodies from various electronic games, primarily those for Nintendo (entertainment) systems. In 2005, a gentleman in the community by the name of Kyle Crouse approached me about submitting a track to his album-length project, a compilation of rearranged versions of virtually every cue on the soundtracks to Namco’s Tales of Phantasia (SNES) and Tales of Symphonia (GameCube).

They are silly games, but good ones, especially once you get over how the writers and localizers apparently drew names from Norse mythology out of a hat and pinned them on characters, mountains, and magical cities at random like tails on paper donkeys. I put my name up for one of the rather incidental but catchy tracks from the Symphonia score, partly because all the good ones were taken, and whipped something up on my Clavinova one evening in July. As I recall, I skipped a Shakespeare play to do it.

Four years later, Mr Crouse has finally released his project—which I suspect is literally the work of his whole adult life—as Summoning of Spirits: An Arrangement of Music from Tales of Phantasia and Tales of Symphonia. It is fifty-three tracks in length, which I’m told amounts to over five hours of music.

Here’s the YouTube announcement video, with ten minutes of audio samples. (Try not to think about how this project was conceived before anyone knew what YouTube was.)

My contribution is “Continental Divide”—Disc 4, Track 2. I selected the title because the original track comes from a point in the game where the characters cross between two symbiotic worlds that are rapidly drifting apart. A continental divide, in geography, is the border that lies between two watersheds; if you take the Continental Divide of the Americas, for example, the water flows to the Pacific on one side, and the Atlantic on the other. Symphonia-trained ears will pick up on some of the character motifs that I tried to weave in contrapuntally.

Please excuse my sloppy clarinet technique—I was out of practice for years at the time, and I would have re-recorded it had I not lost my raw audio data along with everything else on my old computer. And do enjoy the rest of the album; I should too, eventually.

Related reading:

• The announcement on the OCRemix forums.
• An interview with Kyle and artist/co-producer Aleah Baker. Ms Baker is kind enough to draw attention to my cut, which, she says, “takes an already pretty track and makes it magical, corny as that sounds” (aw, thanks!).
• A few accompanying illustrations and artwork.

So I was surprised to discover that a video game band—and a jazz band, no less—had sprung up in my very own a mare usque ad mare backyard under the name of The Runaway Five, after the Blues Brothers spoof band that lets you hop on their tour bus in the oddball Super Nintendo classic EarthBound. I saw them live at the Beat Niq on Saturday, and walked away pleased with a lot of what I heard.

I am careful to say “what I heard” because, in a bungled cross-product of the sound engineering and where I was sitting (but mostly, I conjecture, the former), there were serious acoustic issues that worked against the band. Never mind the unfortunate trend of miking and amping everyone in sight in tight basement clubs where a live sound would serve them better—there were fundamental EQ problems with what was coming out the other end, as if the treble had entirely dropped out. A lot of what the band was trying to do harmonically got lost in the midrange mud-crunching.

As for the band itself—a guitar-piano quartet in the first set and an octet with four horns in the second set—it is the very archetype of the young 2000s band that draws on a potpourri of stylistic influences without necessarily committing to one or another. If their point was to illustrate the versatility of their source material, I’d say they got it across. I jotted down their whole set list but I won’t bother reproducing it here; instead, here are a few performance notes.

(more…)

Galaxy is the first Mario title to feature live orchestral music, as opposed to music generated by the game system’s MIDI instruments. While most video games have been moving towards scores on par with movies in sound quality and composition—two of the most promising film composers of the past decade, Harry Gregson-Williams and Michael Giacchino, come from a background in games—Nintendo has traditionally been reluctant to move away from programmed music, mostly because of its adherence to the philosophy that interface is always the highest priority (something we similarly observe in their attitude towards story). For instance, they insisted on programmed music in The Wind Waker so it could change dynamically in response to the actions of the player, such as consecutive hits with the sword, and to indicate changes in the environment like the presence of unseen enemies.

In the Mario series, the music serves an even subtler function: it determines the rhythm of the game. It’s there to push the player towards a natural tendency to activate sound effects associated with certain actions—jumping, hitting blocks, collecting power-ups—on the beat.

That’s what the composers claimed, anyhow—and that’s the kind of claim I just had to verify.

(more…)

The article was originally filed under the Faculty of Arts news page (here). For some reason, the ExpressNews version adds this somewhat awkward lede:

September 4, 2007 – Edmonton – New university students will hear warnings that they won’t get much studying done if their room mate has a video games. But the opposite would be true if you roomed with Guillaume Laroche.

Having actually roomed with Mr. Laroche on one occasion, I seriously beg to differ. But I digress.

I was directed to the original article upon its publication on the Arts page about a fortnight ago, and I remember thinking exactly two things: a) “Well, that’s some good publicity,” and b) “I can’t believe he convinced them to print the word ludomusicology.” Ludo-what? Perhaps I should explain.

(more…)

If you’ve had a Wii for any amount of time, you’ve probably spent a couple hours in the Mii Channel making caricatures of friends and celebrities alike to fill up your ragtag baseball team. (Dan Lazin, for one, sent me a most excellent Lieutenant Worf.) And if you have, then it’s almost a certainty that the Mii-making music has been stuck in your head at least once. Naturally, I set about figuring it out on the keyboard, only to discover that I couldn’t quite get all the chord progressions right by ear.

So the other night, I turned on my Wii, set it to the Mii Channel, and did a rough transcription of the music as it played, mostly to figure out what was going on harmonically. Like most of the repetitive but catchy incidental music that comes out of Nintendo, there’s a great deal of complexity under those unassuming bleeps and bloops. So I switched up the rhythmic feel from Latin to a medium swing, jotted down some fancy chord substitutions, and decided to see where I could take the tune. Here’s the result:

I’m not all that happy with my solo, but I almost never am, and given that most listeners are absurdly easy to impress, I doubt a lot of people will complain. I gave myself a fairly challenging set of chord changes to play over, so the take I recorded was more about surviving four choruses and staying in time than actually taking risks and coming up with lovely melodic architectures. It’s easy to stretch out and aim for the pretty notes when you’re just jamming, but recording a complete take creates considerably more room for error. Apart from cutting back on the arpeggiation and going for longer melodic lines, there are two other things I’d change should I do this again. First, it swings a bit hard for a two-beat feel, and probably isn’t as laid back as it should be. Second, my left hand is mostly preoccupied with spelling out the bass line here, so the chord voicings are quite sparse; if I were to do a bassless recording, it would free up the left hand to highlight some of the more interesting substitutions I found.

As I said earlier, this is a surprisingly deep tune, compositionally speaking. I’ll go into some specific analysis for the benefit of the musically literate.

The biggest wrench in the whole affair is the oddball 25-bar form. There’s a straightforward 16-bar A-section that modulates to the subdominant (in the original, from A to D major; in my version, from B-flat to E-flat), followed by a 1-bar break and an 8-bar B-section (the only part in the original that really casts a melodic line into the foreground). In the video, I chose to keep the break at bar 17 in the solo choruses just to keep the tune quirky, and encountered all of the expected difficulties. I may do another take at some point that keeps bar 17 when playing through the head, but removes it for a more predictable (and playable) 24-bar solo form.

Harmonically, the most interesting part is probably how the B-section modulates back to the original key (again, A in the original, and B-flat in my version). The tonal centre moves up a major third: there’s a II-V-I in E-flat followed by a II-V-I that resolves to G major, which then drops to a minor and proceeds down the circle of fifths until we’ve returned to the key of B-flat. Jazz musicians will recognize the major-third jump as one of Coltrane’s “giant steps,” which most obviously predates Coltrane in Rodgers and Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones?” and becomes commonplace in a lot of post-Coltrane compositions by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and the like. Here, we don’t take the tonal centres all the way through a circle of thirds (which is more of a triangle), but the modulation from E-flat to G suffices to make the tune particularly susceptible to jazz improvisation with a modern sound, and generally fun to play.

I hope Nintendo lets the cat out of the bag regarding the composer of all the Wii’s onboard music, as I’d really like to give credit where credit is due. I’m sure some people have speculated that it’s the work of Nintendo legend Koji Kondo, but I’m inclined to put my money on Kazumi Totaka, or Totakeke to his legion of Animal Crossing devotees. No sign of Totaka’s Song yet, though.

As longtime readers know, I make a point of catching the Best of OIAF reel every year when they bring it to the Metro, mostly because I can’t justify going to Ottawa for the festival itself, and a digest is typically sufficient. That said, the 2006 selection was a mild disappointment. In the past two years, the touring programme has shown off films in competition in the various categories, but not necessarily the winners, and I think the decision shows. While some of the shorts exhibited some superb technique and story design – Stefan Mueller’s Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker and Chris Choy’s The Possum being my favourites – they were typically the most conventional of a field that was often almost too avant-garde for me (which is really saying something), or at the very least, heavier than usual on the cruelty dealt to furry little animals.

Oscar nominations are here, and they indicate possibly the most unpredictable race in recent memory. Part of that may be because the Oscars are early enough now that the guilds haven’t reported in yet with their own awards; the picture should be clearer going into awards night. But consider the statistical aberrations. I’m hardly one to mistake correlation for causation, but I do think – judging from this year and the last – that the Academy Awards have become considerably more interesting since they were bumped a month earlier, as the nomination deadline arrives before any consensus congeals on the table.

Glad to see six nominations for Pan’s Labyrinth, my tentative pick for the best film of 2006 (though it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, and I still haven’t seen a few major releases I’ve been meaning to catch, notably Letters from Iwo Jima and Dreamgirls). Nothing at all for The Fountain, which is flat-out ridiculous but not wholly unpredictable, though I would have at least liked to see Clint Mansell show up in the Original Score category. Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, I would personally give it to Babel. As for who will win, I haven’t the foggiest.

I’m not going to offer any reasoning for the above. No time, no space, no space-time. Just heed my words and go see Pan’s Labyrinth.

Now let’s talk about video game music. It’s been awhile.

Last night’s performance of Video Games Live was the first symphonic video game concert in Alberta. That’s something to be celebrated, because damnit, it’s about time. Live concert performances of video game music have been going on in Japan for a decade and a half; North America didn’t wake up to the phenomenon until two years ago, with the original VGL performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005, followed by the 2006 debut of Play! A Video Game Symphony (a programme that, with only a handful of global playdates in cities that matter, isn’t going to be here anytime soon).

A matter of personal background and credentials: I’ve been following video game music for years now, as an avid collector and occasional contributor to the remix and arrangement “scene,” even if I haven’t gone so far as to do a Lancastrian study that one can find online. I’m really curious as to when Summoning of Spirits is going to be released, because I whipped up a track from Tales of Symphonia that has been sitting around for a year and a half. In many cases, I’m much more familiar with the music than the games themselves – including a few selections on the VGL programme, such as Kingdom Hearts and a number of the Final Fantasy games. (Several numbers, in fact.) I found some of the best games of all time, Chrono Trigger among them, out of musical curiosity.

Suffice to say, I’m into this stuff.

So to cut to the chase, did I find VGL enjoyable? Yes, very much so. Was it some sort of revelatory, religious experience? No, I wouldn’t say that.

If there’s one thing that really separates a concert like VGL from the sort that was circulating in Japan in the early ’90s (and I’m thinking very specifically of the Orchestral Game Concert series), it’s that we’re firmly out of the chiptune era. While many games, Nintendo titles in particular, still store their music as MIDI data to be rendered by the console hardware (not so much to save space as to leave open the possibility of dynamic, algorithmic manipulation of the music to correspond with in-game events), the big-budget heavyweights in today’s game industry deliver orchestrated music fully formed.

Usually, the best of the game soundtracks are easily on par with the best of what is occurring in contemporary cinema. Two of the most interesting film composers of the decade, Harry Gregson-Williams and Michael Giacchino, got off the ground with music to games like the Metal Gear Solid sequels and Medal of Honor, respectively – both of which were represented last night. There really is no longer a significant gap in audio fidelity and the quality of the composition.

At the same time, I wager that tunes such as the theme from Super Mario Bros. are burned into our collective consciousness precisely because they operated so effectively within severe technical constraints. Composers such as Koji Kondo were tasked with making something chirpy and repetitive not only bearable, but outright fun to listen to. In an orchestral setting, these melodies are primarily interesting for how they are expanded and arranged, and what kind of ideas emerge in the overhauled instrumentation. In the case of a medley – a format often necessary for giving a classic game due coverage and introducing variety to melodies designed to be played in neverending loops – one of the defining elements is also the fluidity of the transitions, and how the piece as a whole functions as a unified suite.

VGL was heavy on faithful renditions of music that was orchestrated to begin with. The chiptune era, the epoch that inspires nostalgia, had a relatively minor presence: there was the opening medley of classic arcade tracks, beginning with the bleeps and bloops of Pong; The Legend of Zelda; accompaniment underneath guests invited to play Space Invaders and Frogger onstage; Super Mario Bros.; and a solo piano medley consisting of music from Final Fantasy, both before the switch to recorded audio in VII and after.

The music from the orchestral era, I have no complaints about whatsoever. Seeing the ESO and the Kokopelli Choir performing Christopher Tin’s “Baba Yetu” from Civilization IV made me a very happy man, even if it did remind me of my, my… my problem. In terms of the audio setup, from where I was sitting off in the Left Terrace, there seemed to be a few balance issues between the choir and orchestra. But I’m being picky. Overall, it was a fine selection of fine music, and it was an especial treat to hear the premiere of the music from Jade Empire as a nod to the local boys over at Bioware.

In terms of video game music, I would characterize the chosen titles as part of the recognizable contemporary mainstream. The curious thing is that what constitutes the mainstream in today’s gaming environment is deeply fractured, given the divisions between the three major console manufacturers and even the PC: we no longer live in conditions that would permit the release of a game everybody knows, short of Grand Theft Auto (where all the music is licensed). You could make a case that in the past few years, World of Warcraft and Halo came about as close as you can get to ubiquity nowadays, but that’s still peanuts next to Super Mario Bros.

So while it was neat to see a cute orchestral translation of the arcade era of game music, where the dominant paradigm was to think more in terms of “sound effects” than “soundtracks” per se, I have to register my profound disappointment with the already scarce representation of the 8-bit and 16-bit generations, which are really the heart of nostalgia as far game music is concerned. And my problem is not with the scarcity: the programme covered the major bases – Koji Kondo (Mario and Zelda), Yuji Naka (Sonic), Nobuo Uematsu (early Final Fantasy). My problem is with the orchestration.

I can’t speak for the Sonic the Hedgehog medley, as I haven’t located its source, but the arrangements of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda were ripped directly from the ones performed in Japan’s Orchestral Game Concert. This is a bad thing for a number of reasons. First, I think these two particular arrangements are becoming standardized as the orchestral suites representing their respective games, and quite frankly, I don’t think they’re good enough for that to happen.

I don’t mind the Mario suite so much – I’ve always liked the inclusion of the woodblock to punctuate the overworld theme, and while I don’t think much of the transitions or the ending, it’s functional. If you’ve ever downloaded an MP3 file of the orchestral Super Mario Bros. misattributed to the Boston Pops, you’ve heard it.

The Zelda arrangement, however, is one that I’ve never liked. I can think of no other series that has delivered such a wealth of great melodies, and yet this arrangement chooses to dote on the familiar overworld theme (and not very well; I find it to be quite cliché and generally stale). And I’ve heard it often enough in various places over the years that I fear it is legitimately and dangerously close to being the “official” interpretation. If anything, concerts such as Video Games Live and Play! should be opportunities to commission new and inventive orchestral renditions of NES/SNES-era themes and motifs. There are so many talented composers in video games nowadays that would leap at the chance to do it, likely including Koji Kondo himself, that the absence of talent should not at all be an impediment.

I’m not a huge fan of Martin Leung’s piano arrangements of Mario and Final Fantasy, which were performed last night by his sister Lee Ann. I admire them for their accessibility, and from his videos I can tell that he has the technical gifts as a performer to conduct his position as one of video game music’s foremost ambassadors (and his sister has every bit of that classical musician’s discipline, even if she exhibited brief flashes of rhythmic sloppiness; as someone completely undisciplined who also indulges in rhythmic sloppiness, I’m one to talk). I don’t think he’s a terrific arranger, though: with the Mario series, he often opts for displacing the MIDI onto the keys, and with properties like Final Fantasy where there’s a little more invention, the hit-and-miss Final Fantasy Piano Collections were there a decade ago.

It’s like whenever I hear lounge pianists take on Henry Mancini or Andrew Lloyd Webber: they demonstrate a predilection for fanciful flourishes and grand arpeggiating cadenzas to make everything sound oh-so-romantic, and they’re all people who have clearly graduated from the rites of passage commonly associated with the name “Franz Liszt.” And that has made them virtuosic performers, but what separates them from bona fide composers in the standard Romantic repertoire is this: a decided absence of depth and interest when it comes to harmony. Amidst all the fireworks and legerdemain, it’s easy to overlook the harmonic complexity of the great European composers. Even we jazz people like to think that our fourth voicings and modal substitutions over Richard Rodgers are so inventive and hip, but for the most part we’re just lifting from Debussy with one hand and the blues with the other. It’s still an improvement on the easy-listenin’ aesthetic of sitting on major and minor triads and leaving it at that.

But these are the back-in-my-day gripes of a grizzled vet, after all, and I’m sure it’s all really cool if you’ve never heard acoustic performances of classic video game music before. It was probably neat for me too, the first time. I can’t quite remember. People seem to tip me better when, after a few drinks, I stop being professional and start treating the piano as a party trick (i.e. play video game music). If you’re not used to it, it might just be novel.

I haven’t commented much on the VGL production itself, with the smoke and coloured lights and onscreen video game footage and what have you. In most cases I don’t think it was particularly necessary, and perhaps it was even a distraction, but where it really shone was in the arcade-era games, where the music really doesn’t stand on its own (when it isn’t outright plagiarized from the Romantics, which it often was back in the day), and is only effective in juxtaposition with the images. Maybe it was the selection of the images themselves: virtually every scrap of footage predating the rise of the PlayStation was inherently in-game footage, whereas afterwards, the focus was on full-motion video introductions. (Let’s face it: Civilization IV may be hard, hard crack, but it’s not exactly stimulating to watch somebody else play.)

As a project to demonstrate to everyone just how much video game music has evolved, and how fertile a ground it is for film-quality scores today, I would call Video Games Live a wild success. And perhaps that’s consistent with their objectives to move game music towards a certain mass appeal, objectives you can read about in the FAQ on the VGL website. It’s an admirable task, and given VGL’s splash in the mainstream press, the producers are well on their way to achieving it. I may sound rather critical, but in general, it was an excellent programme with some great music that can be enjoyed whether you’ve played the games or not. I do think the retro elements, in particular the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, were given short shrift in terms of quality and quantity; again, it might just be a matter of perspective.

I’m not necessarily inclined to see the show again when it hits Calgary next November. (For one thing, what equivalent does Calgary have to the Kokopelli Choir? Cowtown may be the better city, but if anyone were to make a case defending Edmonton, said choir would be one of the chief exhibits.) But I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing it, not by a long shot. Video Games Live is a worthwhile experience, and a positive step towards establishing mainstream recognition of where game music is today. The potential benefits are immense: every musician or budding composer-arranger who develops an interest in game music is a valuable addition to the community. But first, they need to know that the community is there. I could go on and on with analogies to the tremendous impact that Stefan Fatsis’ book Word Freak had on competitive Scrabble, but I’ve tread that ground many a time before. Take my word for it: the principles at work are the same.

Naturally, it was acceptable, and Bill scraped so many points from the play that I ended up winning by a narrow margin (423-406) in spite of dominating the game until the last few turns. To keep things in perspective, that’s one whopper of an aggregate score between the two of us. One doesn’t often lose with a score over 400.

Ten minutes later: “Oh! Re-state!”

I haven’t posted here lately, but if I had, it would have been about sport. However, I’ve been reading about it instead (hockey and footy, anyhow), and that’s my alibi.

Enough excuses and distractions, though. Here’s a treat for your patience: a live jazz trio playing the Super Mario Bros. theme. That’s the wine-bearing Darryl Meyer on drums, the lovely Aleks Argals on bass, and yours truly on the crazy eighty-eights. Share and enjoy.

That said, I would find it unlikely that very many others have underscored a formal Catholic wedding with music from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for Super Nintendo.

The signing of the registry is unpredictable when it comes to timing, you see. So not only do you need something sweet, romantic and unintrusive – it needs to be extensible, yet easy to conclude on cue. For the latter requirements, turning to classic video games should be the obvious solution, though not one that a lot of mercenary musicians will spot. And to be fair, there aren’t a lot of old Nintendo anthems that make good tearjerkers.

An ounce apiece of “Kakariko Town” and “Zelda’s Lullaby” turned out to be the perfect melodic cocktail for the occasion. The music was very well received, and the source went by unnoticed and strolled off on its innocent little way. It keeps things in perspective that the standards of the game music in-the-know that everyone recognizes and everyone plays – the Kakariko theme, for one, or “Terra”, or “Corridors of Time” – are pretty enough in their own right that they don’t connote frantic button-pushing to the casual observer, unlike, say, anything from Super Mario Bros.

The whole kerfuffle validates one and only one hypothesis: a Koji Kondo melody is a beautiful thing. In a way, I think he will go down as the great lost composer of the late twentieth century, someone who took finite sequences of beeps and whistles in infinite repetition and found art, and receded into the shadows of his accomplishments. Nobuo Uematsu’s already getting his due with the legitimation of game music; the American synchronized swimming team performed to music from Final Fantasy VIII. Zelda aside, though, Kondo and his associates haven’t done a whole lot that translates directly to the realm of the symphonic. For someone who’s written themes that everybody knows, he remains comparably obscure.

Oh, and the honorarium was generous.

There is often some measure of debate on whether or not the music to Tetris should properly be considered a video game tune, as it pertains to what is by convention admissible on remix and arrangement communities like VGMix. There is no doubt that it is through the classic puzzle game that the Russian folk song “Korobeiniki” (“The Peddler”) has seen the most widespread exposure in the Western world, but many are unaware of its roots. For those interested, I would advise a look at some traditional Russian folk dance videos, specifically this one.

It’s amazing how every time there’s a clip like the aforementioned choir performance that spreads memetically over the Web, people swell with nostalgia and perhaps recollect other gems they’ve found – most often the orchestrated medley from Super Mario Bros. from Orchestral Game Concert that is commonly misattributed to the Boston Pops – yet they have nary a clue how big a video game music community is out there, constantly taking the bleeps and bloops of yore and endowing them with near-professional quality across all musical styles. I think there’s a huge audience out there for game remixes that remains untapped, simply because the publicity for these independent niche-genre covers relies almost entirely on word-of-mouth.

I now turn my attention to written media and two posthumous literary treasure troves of note. The first is Runny Babbit, a billy sook by Shel Silverstein – essentially, a book of never-before-published spoonerisms by the master himself. If you grew up on his work, you would understand the warmth of this assurance that his death six years ago was, indeed, not where the sidewalk ends. The second is an archaeological breakthrough that has unlocked an archive of classical texts too unbelievable in scope for words… my words, anyhow. I’ll let this article do the talking.

Speaking of archaeology, I got around to catching the Matthew McConaughey-starring film of Clive Cussler’s novel Sahara. It’s good, clean popcorn fun once it gets past the awkward beginning, albeit nothing special. Intriguingly, one of the things holding it back is that it plays it too safe and doesn’t quite capture the extent of Cussler’s outrageous strokes of revisionist history, which elevate the Dirk Pitt stories to an almost unimpeachably ridiculous degree of escapism (and which, I might add, he pulls off a lot more successfully than the likes of Dan Brown). Although my recollection of the novel is rustier than a decommissioned ironclad – the one time I read it was several years ago – I do recall much of it focusing on a delightfully far-fetched premise involving Abraham Lincoln and a well-placed doppelganger, which was omitted in the adaptation and, to my surprise, somewhat missed.

As far as prospects for a Dirk Pitt film franchise go, it’s hard to say; let’s not forget that Dr. No sucked, but that didn’t stop Bond. And Sahara is far from terrible – it’s more of a one-time pleasure not quite guilty enough to harp on, aside from a number of pesky annoyances. The best compliment that I can offer the movie is this: at least it buries Raise the Titanic! for good.