Flashback Friday: Super Mario Galaxy - Gusty Garden Galaxy | Wii were snatched bald that day

With Nintendo and Illumination having recently released the trailer to Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie, I felt like doing a Flashback Friday post on one of my favourite pieces of music from Super Mario Galaxy: The Game.

Back in 2007, Nintendo randomly released a video online of a recording session for the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack. And y’all. Lives were changed that day.

Yoshiaki Koizumi, Mahito Yokota, Shigeru Miyamoto and Koji Kondo looked bored as hell, like they didn’t even wanna be there. Me? I woulda been screaming, hooting, hollering, crying, wig on the floor — which woulda had us all confused, because none of us came in wearing one. But the truth is, I probably would have also been sat looking like I don’t care. But inside, I would have been screaming, hooting, hollering, crying, wig on the floor.

I remember so clearly how I felt when Nintendo first released this video of the orchestra playing “Gusty Garden Galaxy”. As somebody who grew up with Super Mario games — to hear a piece of music from a Super Mario game go from bleeps and bloops to being this huge orchestral piece blew my mind. And as good as Super Mario Galaxy had looked in trailers, this video made me anticipate the game in the biggest way, purely just to hear the soundtrack. Fuck the gameplay. And when I finally bought Super Mario Galaxy and started playing through it, I was just anticipating when I would hear “Gusty Garden Galaxy”. And now “Gusty Garden Galaxy” has become a signature piece of music in the Super Mario franchise — deservedly so.

Honestly. If I were ever to hear “Gusty Garden Galaxy” live, played by an orchestra, I would cry.

It’s kinda crazy that a Mario game got an orchestrated soundtrack before a Zelda game. But everything Nintendo does for one game is usually in some way a test for another. So Super Mario Galaxy having an orchestrated soundtrack then made it likely that the next Zelda game (Skyward Sword) would also have one.

Super Mario Galaxy was one of the first Nintendo games that I recall where they made a big deal of the music as part of its promo. Releasing the orchestra session and then announcing the release of the soundtrack had everybody excited — until they realised that Nintendo did the Nintendo thing of only making it available to Club Nintendo members. To this day the Super Mario Galaxy soundtracks have officially been released globally. But in light of Breath of the Wild getting an official vinyl release next year, it would not surprise me if closer to the release of Super Mario Galaxy: The Movie, that Nintendo announced that the Super Mario Galaxy game soundtrack was getting a vinyl release in time for Christmas. It makes too much sense for Nintendo to not do, which is exactly why they probably won’t.

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