Generally the best 33 1/3 volumes are the ones that approach the concept of an album differently and in this case, the album consists of three minutes of the video game music that soundtracks The Super Mario Bros video game. Unfortunately this does not work as well as I thought it would.
The first part focuses on the video game industry in the 80’s and the develop of the Super Mario Bros game. This section makes for first class reading.
Then Schartmann delves into Koji Kondo’s life and that is pretty good too. However when when get into the technical compositions of the music i.e which notes were used for what, the book drags a bit, only picking up when there’s some discussion about the sound affects.
Interesting, but I think people more interested in video game music will prefer this volume.
This review was originally on Goodreads
The Bobsphere 