Scott Joplin in the Overworld: Super Mario's Rag-Inflected Score

Abstract

Abstract A rolling banjo, walking bass, steel drum, and syncopated piano. What strange music to accompany your trials and tribulations throughout the Mushroom Kingdom. Eclecticism pervades the Mario franchise and manifests in its digital places, the ways players interact within them, and, indeed, the sounds emanating from them. Mario and his jumping adventures have long been in the hearts of players, the minds of scholars, and the ears of ludomusicologists. By engaging with Koji Kondo's scores for early Mario games, this article highlights an overlooked component in the iconic scores of early Super Mario games: ragtime music. Furthermore, this research contributes examples of African American and Latino musical creation and innovation to ludomusicological discourse. I argue that, as a means to connect, contextualize, and enhance Mario's movement with music, composer Koji Kondo draws from ragtime and early jazz styles because of their distinctive rhythmic qualities. His rag-inflected score establishes ragtime as fundamental to early Super Mario soundscapes. While a substantial ludomusicological body of literature focuses on the Western classical tradition in games, jazz-centered research is scarce. This cross-disciplinary research draws on a wide range of scholarly perspectives from jazz studies and ludomusicology, including work by Andrew Schartmann, Edward Berlin, Ingrid Monson, Neil Lerner, David Butler, and Charles Hiroshi Garrett. As game audio is indispensable in facilitating a player's sense of verisimilitude of Mario's imaginative and, at times, nonsensical worlds, an inquiry into how jazz participates in this unique audiovisual relationship is long overdue.