Press Start 2006: Mother Medley

March 18th, 2009 | Audio Stuff, Events

A while back, there was a big video game concert in Japan called Press Start 2006: The Symphony of Games. I first heard about it from this announcement stuff in an old Famitsu magazine, which also mentioned that there would be music from the MOTHER games.

Anyway, Captain Apollo, webmaster of the premiere Japanese MOTHER fansite MOTHER Party, attended the event and wrote a nice and detailed report about it. I thought I’d share some of that info here now, especially now that a recording of the MOTHER music has turned up.

The event was, as you can guess, a symphony orchestra playing a whole bunch of game music. The music played was:

Part 1

• Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty – Main Theme
• Falling Puzzle Medley
• PoPoLoCrois Medley
• MOTHER Medley
• Outrun – Splash Wave
• Anubis Zone of the Enders – Beyond the Bounds
• Ys

Part 2

• Romancing Saga Minstrel Song – Overture Opening Title
• Monster Hunter – Proof of a Hero
• ICO – You Were There
• The Legend of Zelda Medley

Encore

• Final Fantasy – Main Theme
• Super Smash Brothers Brawl Theme

The MOTHER Medley consisted of:

• MOTHER Eight Melodies
• MOTHER 2 Eight Melodies
• Snowman
• MOTHER 3 Logo Type
• MOTHER 3 Porky’s Theme
• MOTHER 3 Love Theme

And here are some quick tidbts of info about the MOTHER stuff:

• Before the MOTHER Medley began, Sakai said, “When you think of Nintendo RPGs, you think of Pokemon, right?” But Tanaka responded with, “Huh?! No, you mean MOTHER!”
• Unlike the three previous musical pieces, the MOTHER 3’s introduction was pretty short, so it seemed to people that they weren’t giving the MOTHER games much attention at all. But with the big guests that appeared during the performance and the numerous surprises, the feeling is they did the introduction like that on purpose to seem out of the ordinary.
• After the performance, Tanaka said, “I’d like to introduce not the mother of MOTHER, but the father,” and Sakai said, “We have an extremely big-time guest here with us,” to which everyone in the seats responded with, “Eh?! Itoi?!”
• Just as Sakai said, “Here’s Shigesato Itoi!” Shigesato Itoi came out wearing a MOTHER 3 logo T-shirt and appeared on stage with Sakai, who was wearing a Franklin Badge T-shirt.
• After that, Sakai introduced the MOTHER medley and joked that “Snowman” is something that’s stuck through all three MOTHER games, like a shish-kebab. The audience laughed at that.
• Sakai asked Tanaka if he had played MOTHER 3 yet. Tanaka replied with, “I actually went and gave the mother’s character my own name…” and that got a lot of laughs from the crowd. He thought the cutest character was the mother.
• After that Itoi talked at length about how the music for MOTHER 3 was made. Itoi basically said, “It started with ‘Hello’.” He also said, “There was so much music that needed to be made that the job fell to Sakai.” (note: Tanaka is/was busy as president of Creatures and Keiichi Suzuki was busy with his own stuff too)
• After that, Sakai introduces MOTHER3+, and then announced that nearly 50 songs that didn’t make it onto MOTHER3+ would be put together into an approximately 15-song iTunes album called MOTHER3i, to be released a few months later.
• On the topic of so many songs being cut from MOTHER3+, Itoi jokingly said that all the songs are already there in the game for you to listen to if you want.
• And then the main song of MOTHER3+, “We Miss You”, had its world premiere. The feeling in the air was that this song was definitely going to be a famous one.
• The audience seemed to react to all the MOTHER 3 discussion enthusiastically, and it was clear that people really supported the game. Also, many people we wearing MOTHER T-shirts, and the applause when Itoi was introduced was especially great, so it seemed that a lot of MOTHER fans had been in attendnace.

Anyway, this all happened over two years ago, and only now have I come across a recording of the MOTHER medley. So here it is! If you want a download link too, here you go. Thanks to the commenters who helped get the file 😀

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