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      in Music

      Super Mario Bros. and Daddy Yankee Added to Recording Registry

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      The Library of Congress has designated 25 recordings, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”Super Mario Bros. are currently ruling the box office. Now, they have also been designated an unlikely national treasure by no less than the Library of Congress.The composer Koji Kondo’s 1985 theme for the video game is among the 25 recordings just added to the National Recording Registry, joining Madonna’s 1984 album “Like a Virgin,” Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit “Gasolina” and some of the earliest known mariachi recordings as “audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time.”The registry, created in 2000, designates recordings that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant,” and are at least 10 years old. This year’s entries were selected from more than 1,100 nominees submitted by the public. They bring the total number of titles on the registry to 625 — a tiny but elite slice of the nearly 4 million songs, speeches, radio broadcasts, podcasts and other recorded sounds in the library’s collection.This is the first time a video game soundtrack has been selected, according to the library. In the decades since the game’s release, Kondo’s “jaunty, Latin-influenced melody” (as the library describes it, calling it “the perfect accompaniment to Mario and Luigi’s side scrolling hijinks”) may have been driven permanently, or perhaps annoyingly, into the collective brain.But its creator remains relatively unknown. Kondo, who was born and raised in Japan, wrote the ditty — officially known as “Ground Theme” — in the 1980s, after seeing a recruiting flyer from Nintendo on a university bulletin board in Osaka.In a statement, Kondo, 61, who still works for Nintendo, said he was delighted by the designation. “Having this music preserved alongside so many other classic songs is such a great honor,” he said. “It’s actually a little difficult to believe.”And its significance, according to the library, goes far beyond the song itself, which was inspired in part by the music of the Japanese jazz fusion band T-Square. According to the library, Kondo’s soundtrack “helped establish the game’s legendary status and proved that the five-channel Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sound chip was capable of a vast musical complexity and creativity.”This year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin.”Library of CongressThis year’s list is heavy on familiar pop hits, including Led Zeppelin’s single “Stairway to Heaven,” Queen Latifah’s album “All Hail the Queen,” Mariah Carey’s single “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”Many are deemed significant not just for their musical contribution, but for the broader cultural shifts they exemplify. With “Gasolina,” the first reggaeton recording on the registry, the library notes that its “aural dominance” ushered in “a full reggaeton explosion and even saw various radio stations switching their formats,” including some from English to Spanish.The earliest item added to the registry is “The Very First Mariachi Recordings,” a compilation of recordings (including “The Parakeet”) made in 1907-9 by a group from the rural state of Jalisco, Mexico. The four musicians, led by the vihuela player Justo Villa, are credited with having introduced the style of music to the capital city — and eventually the world — a few years earlier.The most recent is the Northwest Chamber Orchestra’s recording, released in 2012, of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra,” which was inspired by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.The registry also includes some spoken-word recordings. The journalist Dorothy Thompson’s radio commentaries on “the European situation,” made between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 1939, are cited as a “unique broadcast record” of the period right before the outbreak of World War II.The library’s list also recognizes Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot,” a short 1994 recording of him explaining the ideas behind his book of the same title. It was inspired by a famous photograph of the Earth taken by the space probe Voyager 1 during its final mission, which Sagan describes as revealing how the Earth was “a mere point in a vast, encompassing cosmos.” More

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      in Movies

      In 1993 ‘Super Mario Bros.’ Bombed; in 2023, It’s a Hit With a New Generation

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      A critical and commercial disaster in its day, the video-game adaptation was trashed even by its star, Bob Hoskins. But a reappraisal is underway.The new animated film “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” recreates the sunny spirit, effervescent action and confectionary aesthetic of the namesake video games, with the voices of Chris Pratt as Mario, Charlie Day as Luigi, Jack Black as Bowser, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach. Expect periwinkle skies, green warp pipes and squeaky-voiced, mushroom-headed characters.The mustachioed Nintendo mascot has been on the big screen before — even though some of the people involved would prefer to forget about it.Way back in 1993, the popularity of Super Mario led to Hollywood’s first big-budget video game adaptation. The live-action “Super Mario Bros.” starred Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, two down-on-their-luck plumber brothers picking up odd jobs in Brooklyn. Largely shot in an abandoned cement factory in North Carolina, the movie was mostly set not in the hyper-colored Mushroom Kingdom, but in a grody, dystopian alternate version of New York called Dinohattan, ruled over by the maniacal dictator King Koopa (Dennis Hopper). Sticky, elastic fungus plays a key role in the plot. It looked and felt nothing like the video games.To Rocky Morton, who directed the movie with Annabel Jankel, that was the point. Morton and Jankel were British music video filmmakers who also had been behind the creation of the pseudo-computer-generated TV show host Max Headroom. Morton and Jankel’s agent had sent them a Mario Bros. movie script by the “Rain Man” co-writer Barry Morrow. Dismissing that screenplay as too cute, Morton pitched another idea: a darker, grittier Mario Bros. origin story.“It felt like such a great opportunity,” Morton said in a recent phone interview, of turning the video game phenomenon into a movie. “It seemed like the obvious thing to do. And it would have a built-in audience. It was made in heaven.”The result was a critical and commercial disaster. Roger Ebert declared it “a complete waste of time and money.” (Though Gene Siskel allowed, “I like the Goombas,” referring to Koopa’s oversized henchmen.) Several of the actors spoke disparagingly about the production, with Hoskins calling the shoot a “nightmare.” It was game over for any sequel, and for the Hollywood careers of its directors too.In more recent years, millennial Nintendophiles who were put off by the movie in 1993 — or, like me, simply avoided it — have given it another chance.Today, “Super Mario Bros.” has been the subject of something of a reappraisal, achieving a surprising cult status in the process. Its listing on the cinephile movie rating site Letterboxd is accompanied by a host of passionate, discerning reviews. “Super Mario Bros.” is “film-literate, daring, political, and unapologetically insane,” wrote the user Zeke Knott. While awaiting the coming fan-made documentary, “Trust the Fungus: Bob-Omb to Cult Classic,” fans can listen to a podcast dedicated to a minute-by-minute dissection of the movie, or visit the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, which is holding an exhibition on it. This month, Nitehawk Cinemas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, will screen “Super Mario Bros.” as part of Re-Consider This!, a series showcasing misunderstood masterpieces.The excessive artistic license taken with the adaptation is part of the fun of it, said Desmond Thorne, a film programmer at Nitehawk. “In an age when we’re inundated with video game and comic book adaptations that take a more literal approach, it’s refreshing to look back at ‘Super Mario Bros.’ 30 years later,” he said. “You have to admire the huge swings that it took.” For “huge swings,” see, for example, the scene in which Dennis Hopper takes a mud bath with Fiona Shaw.But even the most ardent fans will admit that “Super Mario Bros.” is kind of a mess. Morton said the problems began after Disney purchased the distribution rights, demanding an extensive rewrite of the screenplay — less effects-heavy, more family-friendly — that arrived 10 days before principal photography began. (Disney was unable to locate anyone involved in the production for comment.)But it’s a fantastic and inspired mess with densely artificial sets concocted by the “Blade Runner” production designer David L. Snyder; cartoonish costumes by Joseph Porro (who most recently worked on “The Mandalorian”); and a lunatic score by the composer Alan Silvestri. Elsewhere, Patrick Tatopoulos’s creature designs anticipate his work on “Independence Day.”“The film is such a kitchen sink in terms of inspiration and execution,” the superfan Ryan Hoss said. “Practical sets, makeup, costumes, pyrotechnics, prosthetics, animatronics and puppets. It has tone issues, and too many cooks in the kitchen, but you can point to any part of the story of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and it’s fascinating to someone on some level.”In 2007, when Hoss was in college, he created the website Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive. “I felt that the conversation around the film just wasn’t what it deserved,” he said. The site was “a place to get as much of the background and history of the film out in the open.”Since then, Hoss, along with the site’s editor in chief, Steven Applebaum, has tracked down alternate versions of the script, set photos, and props, and published numerous interviews with crew members. Most recently, they uncovered and restored an early work print of the film, creating an extended edition available to watch online.They’ve also held screenings and other events for like-minded fans. “It’s one of the most enthusiastic and positive fandoms I’ve ever seen,” Hoss said.He added, “The biggest surprise has been getting to know so many of the talented cast and crew that worked on the film. They’ve all said that ‘Super Mario Bros.’ was one of the most memorable films of their career.”Leguizamo has said he’s proud to have been involved in the film. “I’m O.G.,” he told IndieWire recently, also praising Jankel and Morton for their commitment to diverse casting. They “fought really hard for me to be the lead because I was a Latin man,” he said. “It was such a breakthrough.”Today, Morton looks back at the whole experience as one of utter humiliation. “It was horrible, just a really horrible experience.” (Jankel did not respond to an interview request and apparently has not participated in any stories about the making of the movie. “It really did affect her,” said Morton.)The re-evaluation of “Super Mario Bros.” is “heartening,” said Morton. And yet, the fact that the once-reviled movie is being celebrated and enjoyed — without irony — doesn’t seem to have sunk in for its director. The day after our interview, he agreed to attend a Hollywood screening of the movie, his first time seeing it in about 20 years. “They wanted me to introduce it but I can’t think of anything positive to say.”As for the new film, if all goes well, it might signal the launch of yet another movie franchise, the Nintendo Cinematic Universe. Which, Morton admitted, is probably what audiences expected 30 years ago. “That’s the film that everybody wanted,” he said. “And they’ve got it now.” More

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      in Movies

      Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain

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      Rotating a colorful shape before slotting it into the perfect position is such a satisfying experience that Tetris has joined chess in the pantheon of universally recognizable games.Less familiar is the true story of how a prototype created in 1984 by a software engineer for the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences ended up reaching millions of players across the world. The movie “Tetris,” which stars Taron Egerton and was released on Apple TV+ on Friday, explores those humble beginnings.The addictively simple puzzle game features seven uniquely shaped pieces, each composed of four square blocks. Players move, rotate and position the pieces to form solid lines, which are then cleared away, allowing for potentially endless play. The game’s name — derived from the words “tetra” (Greek for “four”) and “tennis” (the sport enjoyed by the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov) — has even pervaded culture as a verb, like when you “Tetris” your luggage into the overhead bin on a plane.In an interview with The New York Times, Pajitnov described Tetris as “the game which appeals to everyone” and said he hoped that its future included e-sports and the integration of artificial intelligence. He is also working on making “a very good” two-player version of the game but said “we are not there yet.”Before Tetris was able to cement itself as a household name with releases on consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, Henk Rogers, the character played by Egerton, had to journey to the Soviet Union and fend off competitors to secure the game’s rights. As the film shows, that was an arduous task that paid off immensely.Here are more details about the game’s creation and why it has resonated with so many for so long:The Nintendo Game BoyIn the nearly four decades since Pajitnov created Tetris using the Pascal programming language on the Electronika 60, a Soviet-made computer, more than 215 officially recognized versions of Tetris have been released.Perhaps the most notable variant is the one that was packaged with each copy of the Nintendo Game Boy when the hand-held gaming console was released in 1989. But that incredibly successful pairing — the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color have combined for about 120 million unit sales — almost didn’t happen.The president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa, initially wanted to bundle Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, following the company’s success packaging Super Mario Bros. with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers, however, was able to convince Arakawa that Tetris should be included instead, in part because it would appeal to a broader group of demographics.Pajitnov described the partnership as “two creatures created for each other: Game Boy for Tetris and Tetris for the Game Boy.”“Tetris” shows an early example of the video game featuring seven unique shapes.AppleThe Tetris EffectAs anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.You may have experienced the Tetris Effect yourself if you’ve ever seen tetrominoes, officially known as Tetriminos, when you’re trying to bag your groceries.In professional studies, the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex. Haier’s studies also demonstrated how Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.A study in 2017 by researchers at Oxford University and the Karolinska Institutet showed that Tetris had the potential to provide relief for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, if they played the game after an incident while recalling a stressful memory.The Quest for PerfectionDecades after it was invented, Tetris continues to have staying power. Newer versions of the game include Tetris Effect, which builds a Zen experience via music, and Tetris 99, in which players try to outlast opponents who are meddling with their boards.In competitive play, new methods of moving the pieces are still being discovered. The standard way to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris — yes, the game first released in 1989 is still used at the Classic Tetris World Championships — is by holding the gray rectangular controller so that the left hand controls the movement of the pieces, and the right hand manages the rotation. But that method, known as “delayed auto shift” in the competitive community, has been usurped in recent years by “hypertapping” and “rolling.”Hypertapping involves rapidly pressing the buttons, countering the traditional sensation that pieces are slowly being dragged into position. Rolling lets pieces be moved even more quickly, by flicking the fingers of one hand along the back of the controller.The power of hypertapping became clear in 2018, when a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee used the method to defeat Jonas Neubauer, a seven-time world champion. But in the years since, the rolling method has dominated the competitive scene. Not only is it incredibly effective, but it seems to be less strenuous on fingers and hands. More

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      in Television

      ‘The Last of Us’ Creators on Turning Video Games Into TV

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      Hollywood has mostly failed to adapt successful video games into satisfying series and films. In an interview, the creators of this new zombie thriller explain why it can be the exception.When “The Last of Us” came out in 2013, the hit video game’s premise — a fungus turns people into zombies, leaving society in shambles, and what government remains is controlled by fascists — seemed squarely in the realm of fiction. A decade later, an HBO series based on the game is set to be released, on Sunday, to a public that has grown all too familiar with the possibility of a germ apocalypse.The reality of what the world has been through over the past three years is alluded to in a chilling opening scene in which a pair of scientists describe the risk of various pathogens to a talk show audience. After one of them describes something like Covid-19, the other silences both the fictional crowd and us when he expounds upon the ways in which a warmed-up planet could lead to something much, much worse.“Part of writing for an audience is just feeling in your bones what is cultural knowledge,” said Craig Mazin, one of the showrunners. “On the other hand, it’s not a show about the pandemic — it’s about what it means to survive and what’s the purpose of survival. So we get that out of the way pretty quickly.”Over the past decade, as video games have become more vivid and complex, developers have used the medium to spin rich, character-based stories that rival film and TV in quality. “The Last of Us,” for instance, is less about the actual outbreak than the father-daughter relationship between a smuggler named Joel (played by Pedro Pascal in the series) and a 14-year-old girl named Ellie (Bella Ramsey). Their journey across the United States, past zombies and cannibals, raises questions about the limits of love and the atrocities a parent will commit in the name of protecting a child.Acclaimed for its narrative depth, “The Last of Us,” the game, follows a smuggler named Joel and a girl named Ellie across a post-apocalyptic America.Sony Interactive EntertainmentBut while a handful of game-to-screen adaptations like the “Tomb Raider,” “Resident Evil” and “Sonic the Hedgehog” franchises have made enough money to warrant sequels, there is a sense that unlike, say, comic books, the stories in video games have never been properly translated.“A lot of them have been embarrassing,” said Neil Druckmann, who led the creation of “The Last of Us” and its 2020 sequel, “The Last of Us Part II,” and created the HBO show with Mazin. (Druckmann is also a showrunner.)For Hollywood that means a gold mine of intellectual property with a built-in audience of gamers has gone mostly unexploited. Given the pedigree of the creators — Mazin created “Chernobyl,” the Emmy-award winning mini-series, while Druckmann and his studio, Naughty Dog, are considered the benchmarks for narrative storytelling in games — fans are hoping “The Last of Us” will be different. Either way, viewers should prepare to see more games onscreen soon: Other popular video game franchises with film and TV adaptations in the works include “Twisted Metal,” “Ghost of Tsushima” and “Assassin’s Creed.”In a joint video interview late last month, Mazin and Druckmann discussed “The Last of Us,” what they changed from the game and what they didn’t, and why their philosophy for adaptation was to cut away much of the action in order to make the post-apocalyptic world feel more real. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Inside the Dystopian World of ‘The Last of Us’The post-apocalyptic video game that inspired the TV series “The Last of Us” won over players with its photorealistic animation and a morally complex story.Game Review: “I found it hard to get past what it embraces with a depressing sameness, particularly its handling of its female characters,” our critic wrote of “The Last of Us” in 2013.‘Left Behind’: “The Last of Us: Left Behind,” a prologue designed to be played in a single sitting, was an unexpected hit in 2014.2020 Sequel: “The Last of Us Part II,” a tale of entrenched tribalism in a world undone by a pandemic, took a darker and unpredictable tone that left critics in awe.Playing the Game: Two Times reporters spent weeks playing the sequel in the run-up to its release. These were their first impressions.The “Last of Us” games are about a global pandemic in which the cordyceps fungus, a real-life fungus that can take over the bodies and minds of insects, jumps to humans and turns people into zombies. Suddenly that premise feels a lot less fantastical.CRAIG MAZIN Neil made the smart decision all these years ago to say, you know what, instead of some invented no-name zombie virus, or rage serum, or some supernatural hell-has-fallen-and-the-dead-will-walk-the-earth —NEIL DRUCKMANN Radiation!MAZIN Yeah, radiation, which is just an outrage. Instead of all that, why don’t we go find something that’s real? And he did. I mean, that’s what cordyceps does to ants. I love the science of it.“I believe that most fans are going to react positively to it, because we made it with love,” said Craig Mazin, right, on set with Lamar Johnson. “But if people don’t, I get that too.”Liane Hentscher/HBODRUCKMANN Part of the game’s success was that we try to treat it as grounded as possible. And with the show we’re able to take that philosophy even further. So I think why the pandemic [in the games] feels so real, even though it was written before our current pandemic, is we were looking at things like Katrina. Like here’s where government fails, here’s where people can get really selfish, and here’s where we can see these great acts of love.In the games, the outbreak takes place in 2013, whereas in the show it’s 2003. Given that most of the story takes place 20 years later, after the world falls apart, I’m guessing the idea was to place the show in the present day?MAZIN I have this thing about watching shows where a graphic comes up and says, “2053: London.” And I’m like, “I don’t know what 2053 is.” The notion that there’s this twist of fate, and 2023, instead of looking like this, it looks like this — there’s an immediacy to that. I probably inflated its importance in my mind, but it helped me.Gamers are generally of the opinion that game adaptations are pretty horrible. You both seem to agree, and I’m wondering why you think they’ve been such a failure.MAZIN There’s a lot of cringe out there.DRUCKMANN Sometimes the source material is just not strong enough for a direct adaptation. So all you’re left with is a name that has some value to it, but really you’re starting from scratch. Other times it’s that the people in charge are not gamers. They don’t understand what made this thing special. They hang on to really superficial things and they think, for example, plenty of players want to see that one gameplay moment or this one gun from the game.MAZIN Terrific video games are terrific because of their gameplay, but conceptually they may already be copies of something. A copy of “Aliens.” A copy of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” You adapt that and you have a copy of a copy and can just feel a lack of freshness to it.Bella Ramsey, left and Anna Torv in “The Last of Us.”Liane Hentscher/HBOSo what did you try to do differently?DRUCKMANN The most important thing was to keep the soul of it, what it’s about: these relationships. What makes the show are the characters, the philosophical arguments of, “Do the ends justify the means?” And, “How big is your tribe that you’re going to care for?”The least important part was the gameplay. In the game we have long action sequences to get you into a flow state, which gets you to better connect with the character — you see yourself as that character. But if you just try to throw that on the screen in the passive medium, it’s not going to work. And that’s the thing that people often get wrong. The conversation with Craig and with HBO, the encouragement, which I loved, was, “Don’t focus on the action.”Given how many failures there have been, at least creatively, why do you think the appetite for game to TV or movie adaptations is suddenly so large?MAZIN There’s two possible reasons, one good and one not so good. The video game industry has been putting out some remarkable work. It seems natural that once these games achieve this impressive narrative space, you can start to think about porting them over. That’s the good reason.Here’s the bad reason: Somebody in a room who doesn’t know anything about playing video games looks at a PDF of how many copies are sold, and they go, “Well, let’s just do that. We need the title and the character, and the character should look like the guy in the game, and then, whatever, we’ll hire some people.”What are some of the differences in how you build a character for an interactive medium versus a passive one?DRUCKMANN With a game, there are certain constraints. Joel [the game’s main playable character] needs to be capable enough to mirror what you’re doing in the game. So, for example, he’s crouching and he’s killing. If all of a sudden we had a scene where he’s complaining about his knees, then there’s this disconnect. The Joel in the show, because you don’t have to support him crouch-walking or having to fight all these people, there was this idea of, “What if we explore his age and how broken down he is over the years?” Physically, he becomes a different person that’s more realistic than what we could have done in the game.When translating the game into a TV narrative, “the least important part was the gameplay,” Druckmann said.Sony Interactive EntertainmentMAZIN There are parts of games that, because of their design, have to violate reality. In “The Last of Us” — or really any game where you’re playing somebody that has guns, and you’re fighting against other people that have guns — you’re going to get shot. And then you’re going to heal yourself with a bandage, some pills, power-ups, whatever. So exploring the fragility of the body is part of how we honor this different medium. A single gunshot, if it’s not fatal, can permanently damage you as a human being. There is no bandage for this.Are you anxious about how fans of the game will react to changes?MAZIN My job was to be connected with my own fandom and to think about myself as representative of a lot of people, and to ask what would be important to me, what would hurt if it weren’t in the show. I believe that most fans are going to react positively to it, because we made it with love. But if people don’t, I get that too. It’s part of being deeply connected to something.DRUCKMANN My fear, and this just gets into a general conversation around fandom, is that our cast or anybody from our crew will get attacked or insulted as we make certain changes. After “The Last of Us II,” nothing anybody says online can get to me anymore. But I hate when anybody else gets it.You’re referring to the online harassment, including death threats, surrounding, among other things, the gender and sexuality of certain characters in the “Last of Us” games, which is also explored in the show.DRUCKMANN I’ve learned to just accept it and not to give it too much weight. I tend to not be driven by fear. If anything, I lean the opposite. When there’s a certain backlash to an idea, I’m like, then it’s an idea worth exploring.As a fan of the games, I found myself having a kind of reverse uncanny valley type reaction to Ellie in the show, where I was like, “But that’s not Ellie.” It made me realize how deeply I’ve connected to the game version of Ellie, who is voiced by Ashley Johnson but is a digital character. Unlike a live actress, who you realize is a person and might see in other things, you don’t see Ellie anywhere else, so she almost seems to belong to the story.MAZIN What I said to Bella is, people are going to probably have a reaction to you, not unlike Joel’s reaction, which is: “Who is this? This isn’t my daughter. This isn’t the person I love. The person I love looks like this and acts like this, and you’re not it … but I guess I’m stuck with you for a bit.”And then: “Well, you’re kind of growing on me … Actually, I think you’re pretty great … You know what? I would kill anyone to protect you.”That’s kind of how it works with Joel and Ellie, and that’s kind of how I think it’s going to work with the part of the audience that, like you and like me, has such an attachment to the Ellie that Neil and Ashley created in the game. That’s what Bella does magically. Bella does not beg for your approval — I’m talking about her Ellie — she just is that character and you, like Joel, are falling in love with her. More

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      in Music

      Trombone Champ Makes a Hit Video Game of an Unlikely Instrument

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      We asked several trombone players what they made of the popular new game, which laughs both at and with their instrument. Spoiler: They like it, too.LONDON — Backstage at the Royal Festival Hall, one of London’s grandest classical music venues, James Buckle, the bass trombonist for the Philharmonia Orchestra, braced himself to do something he’d never done before: play the familiar opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.Trombone players usually spend most of the symphony waiting in silence at the back of the orchestra, ignored by the audience, only getting the chance to play in the piece’s final, euphoric movement. But thanks to the popular new video game Trombone Champ — a sort of Guitar Hero for brass players — Buckle was having a go at its exhilarating opening as if he were one of the first violins. “I have to admit I’m a bit excited,” he said.Buckle, 29, who gamely agreed to test out Trombone Champ last weekend, gripped a mouse, which he would move up and down to change the pitch of his virtual trombone, and placed his left hand on the laptop’s space bar, which he would hit to play notes. Then, the game began. As a flurry of notes moved across the screen, from right to left, Buckle desperately tried to keep up. But things did not go according to plan, and what came out of the laptop’s speakers was less a Beethoven masterwork than an out-of-tune mess.“God, it sounds like me warming up!” Buckle said.As the tune ended, Buckle leaned back, grinning in delight. “This is going to sound really sad,” he said, “but it felt genuinely great getting to play that.”Over the past week, Trombone Champ has become a surprise phenomenon online, with the game’s fans going on social media to post clips of their fraught attempts to play “Auld Lang Syne,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Last week, a clip of someone mangling Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” was retweeted over 40,000 times.The game has attracted rave reviews. Christopher Livingston, in PC Gamer magazine, called it “a serious game of the year contender” (Livingston added that he wasn’t joking, in case anyone wasn’t sure). A handful of gamers have been so enamored by it, they have built trombone-shaped controllers so they can play the game more like real musicians.But what do real trombone players make of it?Trombone Champ does not take the trombone, or trombonists, very seriously. It calls the players “tromboners,” for a start. Before each song, it displays pseudofactoids about the trombone (“in England, trombone is spelt troumboune,” reads a typical one). In clips, the “tromboner” dances even while playing something serious.But Buckle, the professional trombonist, had only positive things to say about the game. “If it raises awareness or means anyone wants to pick up the trombone, it’s a great thing,” he said.Buckle, with the real thing.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesTrombone Champ is the creation of Dan Vecchitto, a web application designer at Penguin Random House, who — in partnership with his wife, Jackie Vecchitto — in his spare time makes video games in the bedroom of his Brooklyn apartment.Vecchitto, 38, said he came up with the idea four years ago while trying to think of concepts for fun arcade games. “I just got this mental picture of an arcade cabinet with a giant rubber trombone attached,” he said. After realizing that would be difficult to make, Vecchitto set about creating a version where players use a mouse to emulate a trombone’s movements, which would allow them to slide between notes.It was immediately clear the game would be a comedy, Vecchitto said, and he took every opportunity to insert jokes.Vecchitto used to play saxophone in high school bands, but said he had no experience of the trombone. Asked if he consulted any trombonists while making the game, Vecchitto said, “I meant to,” then laughed. At one point, Vecchitto bought a plastic trombone, called a pBone, “so I had some idea what this thing actually feels like,” but that was as close as he got to in-depth research.“I was a little concerned that real trombonists might take offense,” Vecchitto said, “but for the most part they’ve been extremely supportive.”Vecchitto said he had received one negative email from a jazz trombonist telling him the game was disrespectful to the instrument, but otherwise a host of players, including several trombone YouTubers, has praised it.Several trombone players said they thought the game was a positive showcase for the instrument. Xavier Woods, a star wrestler for WWE who plays the trombone in bouts and is also a well-known gamer under the name Austin Creed, said that he had not expected the game to hold his attention, but that he had ended up playing it for hours.The trombone’s joy is its versatility, Creed said: “You can make incredible jazz on it, you can play at Carnegie Hall and the most beautiful sounds will come out of this horn, and then you can play at a kid’s clown birthday and just make everyone giggle.”Alex Paxton, a British composer, said in his London apartment that clips of Trombone Champ were so filled with out-of-tune notes and microtones that they “had all the hallmarks of great experimental music.” Paxton then sat down to try the game for himself. After a few tries, he appeared to grow weary of following its rules, and just started waggling the mouse up and down rapidly to create a barrage of noise. As he did, the screen started glowing a range of psychedelic colors. Then, Paxton went and got one of his own trombones and tried to play a duet with the game.Trombone Champ was not much like playing a real instrument, Paxton said afterward. In real life, he said, notes normally go awry for beginners when a player’s lips are in the wrong position, something the game does not approximate. Even so, the game “shows how the trombone can be a license to be weird, to be yourself,” Paxton said.Whether the game will encourage any online “tromboners” to take up the real instrument remains to be seen. At the Royal Festival Hall, Buckle, of the Philharmonia, invited a colleague, Joseph Fisher, who plays the viola in the orchestra, to give it a try. After struggling with some trombone Tchaikovsky on the laptop — and giggling when he fluffed a note and the word “Meh” appeared onscreen in big letters — he was asked if he might switch instruments.“Not to the trombone,” Fisher said, “but I’m definitely going to get the game.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets’ Review: Is This Loss?

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      In this documentary, the Reddit users who spawned the GameStop gold rush recall their speculation creation.The documentary “Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets” starts with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, as new traders began to use their stimulus checks to try the stock market. The most bullish traders gathered on the subreddit WallStreetBets, where get-rich-quick dreamers share tips for undervalued stocks. At the end of 2020, GameStop was among their juiciest prospects.The amateur investors who made the first GameStop recommendations are an eclectic and irreverent bunch, from a grocery store worker to a day trader who wears a metal helmet to protect his identity. As this group of outsiders saw it, GameStop had been targeted by hedge funds for short investments, essentially making it a stock that earned established investors money if the business went bankrupt. But if the stock rose, those who bought in could benefit from the bubble while generating huge losses for hedge fund managers.It was the dream meme stock, and the film’s subjects recall using the trading app Robinhood to execute their plan to rob the rich and give to themselves. Some made millions. Others failed to cash out, and experienced the consequences of speculation.The filmmakers Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper primarily build the story through their interviews, but they are savvy to match the film’s style to the hyper-online vernacular of their gain-obsessed subjects. Interviews are intercut with the memes that these cheery forum trolls shared when they believed they were in for a fortune. It’s a zippy, entertaining approach that offers a surprising degree of insight into the psychology that produced the GameStop phenomenon. Investors played with serious money, but their mind-set was a farcical dive into hyperspace — a week of gambling in a cyber-Vegas that, for some, was worth the hangover.Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBetsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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      in Music

      Epic Games, Who's Behind Fortnite, Buys Bandcamp

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      Epic Games is acquiring an online music platform that has been embraced by musicians for its eclectic offerings and a payment system that favors artists.The world of independent music got a jolt on Wednesday when Bandcamp, the platform that has been a haven for musicians during the pandemic, announced that it had been acquired by Epic Games, the company behind blockbuster online video games like Fortnite.Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a statement, Epic said that Bandcamp “will play an important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more.”While a small player compared to giants like Spotify, Apple or YouTube, Bandcamp has become a favorite outlet among musicians for letting them control how their music is shared and sold and giving artists the bulk of the income they receive from those transactions. According to Bandcamp, artists collect an average of 82 percent of every sale, and the company says that since it went online in 2008, its payments to artists and labels are “closing in on $1 billion.” By comparison, last year Spotify said it had paid out $5 billion to music rights holders in 2020 alone.For listeners, Bandcamp has also become a cherished smorgasbord, filled with obscure but wonderful music they may find nowhere else.But as streaming has become the dominant format for music, artists have begun complaining, loudly, that they are not receiving their fair share of the bounty. According to industry estimates, Spotify pays record labels, music publishers and other rights holders about one-third of a cent for every click of a song; what portion of that money makes its way into a musician’s pocket is determined by their deals with those labels and publishers.On Bandcamp, on the other hand, artists can upload their own work and set the pricing rules for downloads of their own work — pay-what-you-wish pricing is common. During the pandemic, Bandcamp has waived its fees once a month on “Bandcamp Fridays,” bringing the company waves of goodwill. Even more surprising, Bandcamp says it has been profitable since 2012. (Last year, Spotify had $10.7 billion in revenue and lost about $276 million, according to company reports.)Epic Games, which is based in Cary, N.C., and is privately owned, said little about its plans for music, and a company spokeswoman declined to answer further questions about the deal. But Epic’s statement on Wednesday indicated that it was interested in Bandcamp as a direct-to-consumer marketplace. “Epic and Bandcamp share a mission of building the most artist-friendly platform that enables creators to keep the majority of their hard-earned money,” the company wrote.Fortnite, Epic’s flagship game, has been one of the most innovative outlets for music in video games, allowing artists to appear virtually, often in elaborately produced segments In April 2020, the rapper Travis Scott made what was widely seen as a breakthrough appearance, drawing 28 million players to his virtual performance. For Halloween that year, the Latin pop star J Balvin gave a campy concert dressed as a green-haired Frankenstein’s monster, backed by dancers in costume as ghosts and zombie Cyclopes.Epic has also taken center stage in one of the most high-profile debates in current tech policy. The company sued Apple in 2020, saying that the terms of its App Store — which takes payment commissions of up to 30 percent — were unfair. Epic also fought the public-relations battle around that lawsuit with slick, meme-ready content like “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite,” a parody of Apple’s famous “1984” TV ad that introduced its Mac computer as a joyful disrupter of gray tech monopolies.Last year, in a split decision, a federal judge ordered Apple to give app developers a way for their customers to pay for services that could bypass Apple’s system. Both Apple and Epic Games have appealed that decision.In a statement on Bandcamp’s website, Ethan Diamond, Bandcamp’s chief executive and co-founder, seemed to pre-emptively dispel worries about his platform’s future, and about its value to artists.“Bandcamp will keep operating as a stand-alone marketplace and music community, and I will continue to lead our team,” Diamond wrote, telling artists that “you’ll still have the same control over how you offer your music, Bandcamp Fridays will continue as planned, and the Daily will keep highlighting the diverse, amazing music on the site.” The deal with Epic Games, he said, would help Bandcamp expand internationally and “push development forward across Bandcamp.”As news of the deal spread, some independent artists sounded a note of cautious optimism. Tom Gray of the British band Gomez, who has been a leading critic of Spotify and of the streaming economy in general, tweeted a request for Epic Games: “Please think seriously and long,” he wrote, “about whatever you do with the one place independent artists can always rely on for direct income from recorded music.” More

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      in Music

      The Score of Final Fantasy Gets Its Due at the Concert Hall

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      The beloved music for this video game and others have been covered on YouTube for years. Now some are performed at classical music’s grandest venues.LONDON — At a recent concert here, the bows of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra rose and fell like the mighty sword of Sephiroth, the silver-haired villain of Final Fantasy VII. Onstage, a 32-person choir thundered the antagonist’s name: “Sephiroth!”The audience in the 19th-century theater burst into applause when it recognized the opening notes of “One-Winged Angel,” a battle theme from the game that merges Latin opera, influences from Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and caustic rock music.Almost 6,000 people of all ages attended this Final Fantasy VII Remake concert at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, which showcased the soundtrack to the seventh installment of the hugely popular Japanese video game.Aine McColgan dressed in cosplay for the concert.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesCharlotte Ball as the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesA group of concert goers dressed as Final Fantasy VII characters, including Rufus Shinra, Cloud Strife and Scarlet.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesAt the concert, the two worlds of gaming and classical music merged, and while some concertgoers wore suits and bow ties, others dressed in cosplay as their favorite characters from the game.Charlotte Ball, 27, attended the evening dressed as the game’s protagonist, Cloud Strife, an ex-soldier and mercenary. She spent hours laboriously researching and designing her costume, a sleeveless turtleneck with embroidered brown braces, one shoulder of armor made from foam, and a short-haired blond wig that could easily belong to a member of BTS.“Whenever I hear its music, it brings me back to when I was a kid,” Ball said of the game. “It’s a homage to my childhood.”The audience burst into applause when it recognized the opening notes of “One-Winged Angel,” a battle theme from Final Fantasy.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesFinal Fantasy VII was released in 1997 on PlayStation, and has now been bought more than 11 million times across all major platforms. The enormous popularity of its electronically synthesized score by Nobuo Uematsu evidences the huge impact video game music can have.The Final Fantasy games have an interactive, role-player format, which immerses gamers in the journeys of its heroic protagonists. These journeys are interwoven with music throughout, like a film score. As a result, “you do not just watch a game. You play it, you feel it, you embody it,” said Melanie Fritsch, a professor in media and cultural studies at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Sometimes, people start crying when there is a good moment in a game that’s nicely implemented with the music.”Because of this emotional connection, the influence of these scores extends far beyond the games themselves. Since 2007, there have been more than 200 official Final Fantasy concerts across 20 countries, according to Square Enix, the company behind the game.At the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony this summer, athletes marched to songs from popular games including Dragon Quest, Kingdom Hearts, Sonic the Hedgehog and Final Fantasy, music described by its organizers as “a quintessential part of Japanese culture that is loved around the world.”Uematsu, now 62, single-handedly composed the first nine installments of Final Fantasy scores, creating music that remains a nostalgic rabbit-hole for many fans. A self-described musical omnivore without formal musical training, Uematsu’s work draws on influences from an eclectic mix of progressive rock, Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Celtic and classical music.But video game scores have often been dismissed by devotees of mainstream classical music. Even in Japan, the birthplace of modern video game music, “up until after the millennium, it was regarded as a lesser type of music,” said Junya Nakano, 50, the co-composer of the Final Fantasy X soundtrack.Yoko Shimomura, a prolific video game composer.Osamu NakamuraNobuo Uematsu, who single-handedly composed the first nine installments of Final Fantasy scores.David Wolff-Patrick/Redferns, via Getty Images“There are some melodies I composed almost 30 years ago I’ve almost forgotten,” the composer Junya Nakano said. “But fans are still playing them.”Kosuke Okahara for The New York TimesGrowing up as a video game fan who also had classical music training, Nakano aspired to join the early generation of game composers, like Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama.For the tenth installment of Final Fantasy, Nakano worked with Uematsu on the game’s score. Released in 2001, it was the first game in the franchise to use voice actors for its characters. The challenge for Nakano was to compose the music, along with Uematsu and Masashi Hamauzu, with only a “very rough outline” of the narrative for each movie scene. “We really had to create music based on our imagination,” Nakano said. Along with its sequel, Final Fantasy X sold more than 14 million copies.Writing video game scores isn’t always respected by those in the classical music fields. After majoring in piano at the Osaka College of Music, Yoko Shimomura, 53, applied for a job as a video game composer, a career path that her professors discouraged, she said.“Adults in my generation back then had little awareness about game music,” Shimomura said in a video interview. “So they had no concept to compare it to whatsoever.”But Shimomura went on to become one of the most prolific female video game composers in the world. Her magnum opus is the eclectic score for Kingdom Hearts, first released in 2002, which combines her signature piano, opera and opening music sung by the Japanese American singer, Hikaru Utada.Outside of Japan, the “hegemonic thinking” that elevated classical music at the expense of video game compositions has also persisted, according to Fritsch, the media and cultural studies professor.“There is so much music out there in the world that is not composed by white males with wigs. And it’s good music,” said Fritsch, who also works in ludomusicology, a nascent field of academic research dedicated to the study of video game music.Since 2007, there have been more than 200 official Final Fantasy concerts across 20 countries.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe first installment of Final Fantasy, released in 1987, used technology that initially meant the music was limited to a handful of electronic sounds. As the technology of the game systems evolved, the music metamorphosed with it. The arrival of Final Fantasy VIII in 1999 allowed Uematsu to use recordings from a live orchestra and choir for the first time. “The fans were always aware of the quality of music,” Nakano said.Online, those fans are now giving the music new life. Previously, illegal MP3 downloads, expensive CD imports from Japan and sheet music were the only way video-game-music enthusiasts could replay their favorite songs. Now, a community of fans post videos to YouTube of covers, tutorials and their own compositions, providing a way into the often inaccessible world of classical music.“There are some melodies I composed almost 30 years ago I’ve almost forgotten,” Nakano said, “But fans are still playing them.”For 18 years, Kyle Landry has created piano arrangements of music from various anime, video games and movies on YouTube, gaining more than 700,000 followers. Shimomura’s music, and Uematsu’s in particular, have been gold mines of inspiration.“Nobuo Uematsu’s compositions have been touching my life since 2003, and contributed much inspiration for me over the years,” said Landry.Among the most prolific cover artists is the mysterious “Zohar002,” a Japanese pianist whose covers of music from Chrono Trigger — a 1995 RPG game considered the greatest of the 16-bit era — enticed a huge following on YouTube from 2007, until the account was mysteriously removed, sparking mournful odes to Zohar002’s brilliance, and rumors that they were in fact the game’s composer, Yasunori Mitsuda.“I never dreamed such a great variation would be created by so many fans,” Shimomura said of the online renditions, adding that some fan compositions were better than the originals. “It’s a really great honor for me to say that people love my music.”Hisako Ueno contributed reporting. More