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Comment by phaser | Hacker News Reader

Mario Paint also contains one of the most beautiful soundtracks ever on a video game

The composer of the Mario Paint soundtrack, Kazumi Totaka, is still at Nintendo and most recently did the music for Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020).

Wow, you weren't kidding. I like a lot of VGM, but this was unexpected and probably the most minimal and beautiful VGM tracks I ever heard. If you know any similar ones, post em

Not quite as minimal but some of the SNES Donkey Kong Country music is quite similar (picking one track each soundtrack but there are a bunch of them, particularly water/forest/frozen/caverns ones):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4EjGXRDOH0&t=1116s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIKdZ2827rM&t=2200s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp50IEHtYfk&t=1928s

I never played Mario Paint but the DKC games are still some of my favorites and had excellent quality in almost every aspect of the game. I still have the screwdriver bit needed to change the batteries on SNES games.

Edit: Just noticed this comment on the first DKC soundtrack, by Kyperok45: "Fun fact: all these songs together keeps only 64 kbs on the cartrige".

Love all those, Aquatic Ambience is straight of my childhood sitting on the carpet combing through the reefs

I love the DK "Bramble Blast" def my fav one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73n7HTcmb5g

Seems like all these DK soundtracks all use Korg Wavestation samples in the tracker.

There are so many good ones I don't think I could choose :).

Maybe also "Love is in the Wind" from RiME:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2gfNQP6lgY

That one still builds up to a longer melody at the end while the Mario Paint track has a both slow and meandering feel to it that I guess isn't that common even for ambient stuff.

thanks for sharing

Not a VGM track, but "Something Dark is Coming" from the Battlestar Galactica Soundtrack by Bear McCreary comes to mind.

https://youtu.be/tlwZEutyrX8

I absolutely love hearing songs I like remade in the Mario Paint composer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eFXPibI6-4

These are great! Thanks for sharing!

Wow, I've just noticed that a song I hear all the time on SomaFM's groove salad station, is mostly made from that Mario Paint track! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_PTaqmlC50

Great find! I submitted it to whosampled.com, thank you! :-)

Try Waterworld - Diving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4hqy02sxDI&list=PLE2B2D36E1...

The only (but sufficient) reason to own this game.

Ocean's NES and SNES titles were usually crap, but damn they hade amazing soundtracks!

The real track name is called "Mysterious" and is credited to Hirokazu ("Hip") Tanaka, Ryoji Yoshitomi and Kazumi Totaka.

If you're familiar with Hip Tanaka's work you can definitely see his influence shining through here.

Indeed.

You _might_ enjoy this mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBLSP5pSqBU

I wish there was an extended version of this

Most of original soundtrack tracks are designed to played on a loop. You can get an SPC music player (eg. ZXTune for Android) and listen to this on loop for as long as you like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B95AcbUCm1Y

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