Super Mario Bros Luigi and Mario pose at the “SUPER NINTENDO WORLD” welcome celebration.
Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
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Credit: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
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Courtesy of the artist
If you walk around Tokyo for long enough, chances are you’ll see tourists cosplaying as Mario, Yoshi, or maybe Bowser pull up at a busy intersection. It’s a way for people to live out a real-life version of the massively popular Nintendo game. “Super Mario Kart,” released in 1992, sold nearly 9 million copies around the world, and since then, there have been nine sequels and multiple generations of fans. We’re willing to bet a lot of those fans will recognize this music:
Credit: YouTube
As part of our Sense of Place: Japan series, we sat down with Soyo Oka, the composer behind the soundtrack to the original “Super Mario Kart.” Oka shares her journey, from studying classical music at Osaka College of Music and falling in love with the synthesizer to literally calling up Nintendo in search of a job. (Spoiler: She got the job.)
Courtesy of the artist
Many thanks to interpreter Hideko Morita for their help with this session. Stay tuned for more dispatches from Sense of Place: Japan. This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson, and our line producer is Will Loftus.
Please note that the images have been linked as placeholders (./super_mario_bros_luigi_and_mario_at_super_nintendo_world.jpg and ./soyo_oka_composer_of_super_mario_kart_soundtrack.jpg) and should be replaced with the actual file paths when used in a real context. The YouTube link is provided as text but not as an interactive iframe due to markdown limitations.
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