A new book argues that Super Mario Bros. marked a milestone in the relationship between pop music and video-game soundtracks.

There was a time when video games, much like the tiny computers that powered them, seemed like a passing fad. In the late seventies, millions of young people flocked to arcades for all the flashing colors and fantastical worlds, for unprecedented feelings of authorship and control. To skeptics, however, arcades could be deeply annoying places, in part because of their noise and hectoring sounds, which served little purpose beyond “hailing” passersby. But Koji Kondo, a Japanese fan of progressive rock and jazz exploring his post-collegiate plans, heard something different. He went to arcades because he liked the way they sounded. He heard the music of the future.

We are accustomed to thinking about pop music in terms of its most familiar metadata: songs and albums, scenes and artists. But what about all the other, seemingly incidental music that gets lodged in our heads, from commercial jingles to sitcom soundtracks? In the book “Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. Soundtrack,” the theorist and composer Andrew Schartmann passionately argues for the radical legacy of video-game music. Focussing on Kondo’s much-loved score for Super Mario Bros.—and offering a brief detour through his Deep Purplish soundtrack for The Legend of Zelda—Schartmann brings readers into a world of visionary musicians producing beloved masterpieces in almost total obscurity. Could it be that the largely unknown Kondo, Nintendo’s first dedicated sound designer, was one of the great innovative forces of our time?

Schartmann’s treatise is one of the quirkier entries in Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 1/3 series, which usually consists of slim, focussed investigations into the contexts or arcane histories of classic albums. “Why do our hearts still dance to the ‘primitive’ 8-bit tunes of a bygone era?” he asks in the introduction. There’s a faint self-consciousness to Schartmann’s book, and he builds his case for Kondo’s overlooked genius with overwhelming precision. At times, his devotion to the soundtrack’s technical nuances can make for a fairly dense reading experience. But it’s Schartmann’s sense of conviction, the hyperbole that occasionally frames his dive into composition and structure, that gives the book its charm.

By the time Kondo went to work for Nintendo, in 1984, the capabilities of video-game sound design had evolved from the early, primitive days of the Atari 2600. Still, it was a task that had traditionally been handled by programmers, mostly for logistical reasons. As the pioneering developer Garry Kitchen explained in Karen Collins’s definitive study, “Game Sound,” there simply wasn’t enough memory to worry about elaborate soundtracks: “You put sound in and take it out as you design your game. … You have to consider that the sound must fit into the memory that’s available. It’s a delicate balance between making things good and making them fit.”

The most compelling aspects of Schartmann’s book involve the widening circumference of Kondo’s imagination, the possibilities he saw in this new world of electronic composition. The move to home consoles had freed video gaming from the initial, “hailing” approach to sound. Games were becoming a more private, immersive experience, and Kondo wanted to think about sound in a more experiential way. What was appropriate for a gamer spending hundreds of hours at home? Should the sound accent Mario’s frenetic movements or the serene blue sky?

He ultimately decided that the music would ideally emphasize “the experience that the player is having,” underscoring the player’s sense of participation and interaction, the thrill of spending hundreds of hours of life perfecting hand-eye coördination. As a result, Kondo built moments of tension and catharsis into Super Mario, conceptualizing the various “scenes” and stage motifs as moments drawn from a single, coherent score. There were moments of buoyant, finger-popping swagger, fun-house psychedelia, a waltz along the ocean floor. He experimented with tempo, always returning to the main theme, sometimes with the hyperactive intensity of an overzealous soloist (“Hurry!”), other times with an ominous dirge (“Game Over”). Kondo’s soundtrack features only three minutes of original music, and yet it’s totally absorbing, precise, and economical, spanning joy and pain, hunched-back nerves and blissful tranquility. (Of course, I say this as someone with above-average hand-eye coördination.)

Kondo’s work at Nintendo ushered in a new way of making video-game music. As a result of the collaboration behind Super Mario, during which graphics and audio were developed in tandem, games became more of an all-sensory experience. The stages looked and sounded different from one another: they offered a world where you could get lost. As the video-game business grew more competitive—and as the increased storage capabilities of sixteen-bit gaming allowed for more sophistication than looped riffs—sound design became one obvious way to distinguish your game in the marketplace, whether through realistic sound effects or increasingly intricate, symphonic scores.

The major gaming companies began hiring young musicians seeking a different outlet for their work. In the late eighties, for example, Soichi Terada was a house d.j. and producer who ran the beloved Far East label—a recent compilation highlights the Tokyo label’s releases. Within a few years, he had brought his buoyant, summery style to Sega, most notably in his work for the game Ape Escape. Nowadays, cross-pollination of this sort feels fairly normal. On one hand, there are gaming franchises like Guitar Hero and Grand Theft Auto, whose players can tune into various oldies radio stations depending on their mood. But video games, like movie soundtracks before them, have also become a space for experimentation and play. Artists like Amon Tobin, Health, and Skrillex have dabbled in game work. Next year, Brian Gibson, half of the Rhode Island noise band Lightning Bolt, will début Thumper, an experimental game that he evocatively describes as “rhythm violence.”

There’s an entire alternate history of modern music that revolves around figures like Kondo, Hip Tanaka, and Nobuo Uematsu, whose scores for the Final Fantasy series are now performed in concert halls. This history should consider the way in which video games permeated the structure and feeling of pop music, from early-eighties dance-floor odes—Trouble Funk’s “Arcade Funk,” the Invisibles’ tribute to Donkey Kong, the Jonzun Crew’s Pac-Man-inspired “Pack Jam”—to Terada, Health, and Gibson, and to Web-driven subgenres like “chiptune,” a crinkled, pixelated-sounding music made using the sound chips of now-ancient video-game consoles and computers.

There’s a moment in the Red Bull Music Academy’s fascinating online documentary series on Japanese video-game music when Taku Inoue, known for his work on mid-nineties soundtracks for Tekken, acknowledges how games made people hear differently. Tekken, he explained, provided the first time many young people would be exposed to dance music, so he worked extra hard to insure that his drum-and-bass and dubstep tracks sounded good. Ultimately, the underlying tensions detailed by Schartmann’s book aren’t all that unusual. Before it was possible for anyone with a mobile phone to make tracks that sounded massive and seamless, video-game music was a brittle, adventurous space for people like Kondo to think about the future—about what it meant to make something that sounded “new.”

It’s hard to listen to some of these decades-old sounds and not feel a sense of giddy nostalgia. This fall, Data Discs will reissue the soundtrack for 1992’s beat-’em-up classic Streets of Rage 2 as a deluxe vinyl edition. It’s a spellbinding document of its time, full of the composer Yuzo Koshiro’s chirpy interpretations of the era’s bleeding-edge sounds: scaled-down club tracks, a nod to Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause,” an almost note-perfect interpolation of Inner City’s “Good Life.” It’s the sound of a familiar, age-old musical story: cherished genres translated into new idioms, young visionaries butting up against someone else’s constraints. It was the first time some heard techno, and it was the music they had been waiting for all along.