Twenty years after the Library of Congress launched the National Recording Registry, a resource dedicated to recorded sound preservation, a video game theme song is joining the collection
The theme to Super Mario Bros., released in 1985, has been named as a member of the 2023 class of music to be inducted into the registry.
“Few musicians have had their work become so internationally recognized for decades yet remain so relatively unknown as Koji Kondo, the man who composed the music for the Super Mario Bros. video games in the 1980s,” the Library of Congress wrote in its announcement of the induction.
Kondo’s music was most recently credited in this year’s cinematic adaptation of the game—The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Also being inducted among this year’s 25 selected recordings are Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Officially titled “Ground Theme,” the Super Mario Bros. music is “perhaps the most recognizable video game theme in history,” according to the Library of Congress.
“The amount of data that we could use for music and sound effects was extremely small, so I really had to be very innovative and make full use of the musical and programming ingenuity that we had at the time,” Kondo said in a statement. “I used all sorts of genres that matched what was happening on screen. We had jingles to encourage players to try again after getting a ‘game over,’ fanfares to congratulate them for reaching goals and pieces that sped up when the time remaining grew short.”
Here’s the complete list of this year’s inductees:
- “The Very First Mariachi Recordings” — Cuarteto Coculense (1908-1909)
- “St. Louis Blues” — Handy’s Memphis Blues Band (1922)
- “Sugar Foot Stomp” — Fletcher Henderson (1926)
- Dorothy Thompson: Commentary and Analysis of the European Situation for NBC Radio (Aug. 23-Sept. 6, 1939)
- “Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around” — The Fairfield Four (1947)
- “Sherry” — The Four Seasons (1962)
- “What the World Needs Now is Love” — Jackie DeShannon (1965)
- “Wang Dang Doodle” — Koko Taylor (1966)
- “Ode to Billie Joe” — Bobbie Gentry (1967)
- “Déjà Vu” — Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1970)
- “Imagine” — John Lennon (1971)
- “Stairway to Heaven” — Led Zeppelin (1971)
- “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — John Denver (1971)
- “Margaritaville” — Jimmy Buffett (1977)
- “Flashdance…What a Feeling” — Irene Cara (1983)
- “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” — Eurythmics (1983)
- “Synchronicity” — The Police (1983)
- “Like a Virgin” — Madonna (1984)
- “Black Codes (From the Underground)” — Wynton Marsalis (1985)
- Super Mario Bros. theme — Koji Kondo, composer (1985)
- “All Hail the Queen” — Queen Latifah (1989)
- “All I Want for Christmas is You” — Mariah Carey (1994)
- “Pale Blue Dot” — Carl Sagan (1994)
- “Gasolina” — Daddy Yankee (2004)
- “Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra” — Northwest Chamber Orchestra, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, composer (2012)
