An “interlude” is a short piece between acts in a play. More broadly, it’s any piece in the middle, without a real connection to the main events of the narrative. This is the last entry in this column, but it’s not the last I’ll write on video games and the music that makes them magical.
By imitating the Atari sound in its first two bars, then layering on bass harmony and finally adding percussion once its loop begins in earnest, “The Moon” captures in microcosm the Cambrian explosion in expressive potential between the second and third console generations.
The track, “[Desert] Storm [Bald] Eagle,” sounds almost comically American to me, as if the Japanese composer, Makoto Tomozawa, were parodying the music at an early ’90s American airshow. It sounds like Guns ’n’ Roses sounded in 1993, after grunge and hip-hop had absorbed heavy metal’s countercultural cachet.
A number of Nintendo’s main franchises have roots in horror films. We get Mario via Donkey Kong, which is of course via King Kong. And we get Metroid via Alien: the boss Ridley is a nod to Ridley Scott; Mother Brain is analogous to Mother, the Nostromo’s onboard computer; the parallels between Samus and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley are not negligible.
It’s a song of not knowing what to do with what you’ve just encountered. No matter how obviously meaningful the thing in front of you appears, there is no way you can learn its meaning. Not yet. It’s a tease, a feeling Zelda fans at least tolerate and likely love.
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
