Game Music Thunderdome Round 2.1: The Mario Paint Face-Off

Finally! Our game music voting continues… with a 16-bit twist.

By: 1UP Staff
April 18, 2012

A few months ago, we pitted together 64 of our favorite pieces of game music ever and asked you to vote on them. Once you’d narrowed the picks down to 32, we… well, we got sidetracked a bit and forgot to advance things to the next round. Sorry. But better late than never, right?

We’re compacting our second round into two parts of 16 tunes apiece rather than running them each as daily one-vs-one contests. For this first set of face-offs, we’ve decided to pay tribute to the greatest 16-bit artistic tool of all time: Nintendo’s Mario Paint. These 16 tracks are presented below in fan-made Mario Paint renditions (or ersatz versions created in Mario Paint Composer. It’s the great equalizer! By stripping these tracks from their original context, the core melodies are freed from the shackles of technology and can face off on compositional merit alone. Also, mario Paint remixes are awesome.