With Mario Party landing on the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack service today, the composer Yasunori Mitsuda took the opportunity to share some insights into the creation of the original game's soundtrack on Twitter (as spotted by @gosokkyu). And according to Mitsuda, the experience wasn't exactly the easiest-going of assignments.
The composer, best known for his work on role-playing games like Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears, worked on the party title as a freelancer in 1998, after leaving Square, but struggled to sync up with the game's musical direction.
As Mitsuda recalls in a tweet (as translated by @gosokkyu):
"Mario Party was my first freelance gig; the music director told me they wanted "jazz" but all of my songs got rejected—when I caved & asked for pointers, I learned he specifically wanted "big band jazz", so I have the bitter memory of being like, "seriously?!"
Mitsuda goes on to say in a follow-up tweet that, in total, he submitted almost 200 tracks to the game, which were later scrapped - a personal record that he has yet to beat. This might be a slight exaggeration, though, given that he previously tweeted back in 2014 that he wrote about 200 songs for the project, with only 100 making the cut.
We understand that stuff gets cut all the time in video games, but this sounds like a particularly challenging project for the legendary composer.