There's been a lot of accusations in the past about Koji Kondo, the composer for various Nintendo games, stealing music samples for some of his most classic tracks. I'm probably really late to bring this up but I thought it was interesting and wanted to see what you guys think of it. Here's a list of songs he has supposedly "stolen" from.
There's a few more, but they seemed like a stretch to me. Kondo himself has admitted to taking inspiration from various songs during the 80's, but some of these seem more like direct rip-offs. So, what do you guys think? Inspiration or plagiarism?
>meanwhile Nintendo sues some kid for making a Mario model
Jaxon Stewart
While we're on the topic of video game plagiarism, I figured I could bring this up too: a lot of the music from Fallout 1 and 2 seems to be stolen from obscure tracks. youtube.com/watch?v=orAnm1yM_ZI
Jose Ward
I'll give these a listen in a bit, but I want to say my perspective on music plagiarism really changed after I tried making music. Sometimes you'll think you came up with something awesome by yourself, but later realize it was a melody you unconsciously remembered from another song, or really similar to it, and it's hard to protect against this stuff. To spot true plagiarism I think it takes seeing tons of examples, like Led Zep which ended up getting sued for it. But have a bump either way.
Colton Anderson
Nobuo Uematsu is a much worse offender
Kevin Campbell
kozy condom, lmao
Christopher Gonzalez
Plagiarism would be like Vanilla Ice ripping off Bowie/Queen with his Ice Ice Baby song, which directly rips the background instrumental from Under Pressure. It goes beyond simple sampling as it isn't actually restructured, altered, or remade with different instruments.
John Carpenter wanted Enter the Sandman or Metallica to do a song from his movie 'In the Mouth of Madness', but when he couldn't get either, he, being a musician, just made a song-alike. If you listen to the theme song of the movie In the Mouth of Madness, you'll notice a similarity to Enter the Sandman, but it still stands on it's own as it's an entirely new song.
There are examples of video game songs sounding almost identical too, like E1M1 of Doom 1 and Zero's Theme from Megaman X1. Neither musician was aware of the other, because there's only so many chord progressions possible too. The songs in the OP have a few of the same notes Koji used either consciously or subconsciously, but there's more notes/chords added to his melodies. That's not plagiarism, you can take chords from any song you like and warp it around into a new melody, it's how most songs work nowadays.
Where was this discussion OP? First time hearing about it. I may be misremembering, but every note progression possible was already used back in the 1700s, so who is to say it isn't just a coincidence at worst?
Daniel Hernandez
Are you the guy who made the "similarities to renaissance art in video games" thread? What compels you to make such interesting threads?
Carter Nelson
Literally every song you've ever heard, especially in the video game industry, is inspired or directly referential to a previous work, either deliberately or accidentally. There's just too many existing musical works to write anything completely original. Too few permutations of diatonic chord progressions and diatonic melodies that sound good over them. Too few permutations of commonly-acceptable reharmonizations with modal interchange and line cliches.
Everyone who writes music is influenced by the music they grew up listening to or are currently into. Not a single composer listens to music they like and think "hmmm, I won't write anything that even remotely sounds like this." In fact, most other composers I know take the opposite approach, almost writing soundalikes of tunes they like and then scaling it back over time by adding their own flavor.
Ryan Brown
When I was searching around for this most of the conversations and evidence I found dated back a couple of years, so that's why I said "in the past" >Are you the guy who made the "similarities to renaissance art in video games" thread? No, but that sounds interesting, would love to see that thread if you have it. Also I just made this thread since it's something I've been wondering about for a while and figured an interesting discussion could be had here about it.
Owen Smith
Been here for years but don't recall seen that discussion. You might have better luck generating more discussion in about six hours, or even on /vr/ possibly.
Connor Collins
These two are very similar, he even copied the title. Absolute clear cut case of plagarism, how did he get away with this? youtu.be/xbUTyGfolX0 youtu.be/c5daGZ96QGU
Samuel Turner
Yeah, Nintendo grew from using other people's ideas, just like Disney. And just like Disney they've turned into absolute cunts about copyright.
You can tell they're structurally similar, but in most cases, they're an uncomplicated element that doesn't go anywhere that it did in the Nintendo tracks.
Kayden Fisher
This wouldn't sting as much if Nintendo didn't go around youtube copyright claiming videos that have clips of Nintendo games in them. Fucking scumbags.
Carter Stewart
If troll, this is good enough to get me to reply. Carry on.
remember the composer who got in heaps of trouble for plagiarising obscure german tracks in making music for older Dragon Ball games? I really liked his work.
Nicholas Reed
Actually the dude who wrote Doom 1’s soundtrack was both a musician and a lawyer so he know exactly how much he could get away with
Still a great soundtrack though, every piece of art is influenced by another
Cameron Reed
Originality is the practice of hiding your sources.
Jordan Ramirez
It's the media in general. Same goes with art. To plagiarize is actually encouraged there.
Chase King
I'd say in all the cases above, the excerpts are certainly being used but are being expanded up and changed into a new composition- saying it's plagiarism is a big leap.
Lincoln Adams
Yeah, Yoko Kanno came to mind for me as well. Don't remember the title, but there's a song in the Cowboy Bebop OST that's a straight up 1:1 copy. Doesn't get any more blatant than that.
Thomas Rogers
Music is iterative. This is why genres exist the way that they do.
Cooper Reyes
>type in koji kondo plagiarism >no results found hmmm we all know he does, but it's shitty no one brings it up except here
Lincoln Evans
>inspiration = plagiarism I guess every rapper and hip-hop "artist" should be sued into povery then
>PilotRedSun Shit is garbage. Worse than Sonic Youth. >le bash instruments atonally XD
Caleb Smith
RED SUN RED SUN OVER PARADISE
John Walker
they literally can't be sued because they call it sampling and it is allowed crafty merchants they are
Ryan Martin
>Take one listen to a PilotRedSun track to see just how naively wrong you are. Tons of people have made incredibly shit music before though.
Evan Lee
Sounds like generic ass synthwave or whatever you call it lmao
Levi Perry
So how do you make music? Go to a piano and press keys until something sounds good?
Jack King
Listen to a gigantic amount of music, find out what sort of thing you want to make, look at other people who made a similar thing, imitate them but add in your personal taste. You can also find interviews with most modern musicians where they break down a songwriting process. Non-musicians find that stuff boring but if you don't have a solid process, you're not getting anywhere.
Austin Mitchell
I enjoy his music, but it's just lo-fi electronic/drum-n-bass music. It's nothing new or exciting.
Josiah Davis
>"I-it's an h-homage b-b-bro!"
There. Literally the same excuse people lap up from Tarintino, Kojima, and even John Williams. All sins are forgiven.
Homages are neat. You can get characters that have their distinct flavor while also being one you can recognize their influences playing/reading/watching older media.
Jeremiah Evans
>tfw I loved the fuck out of the Budokai osts before he got outed nearly a decade or so ago Least I got introduced to Stratovarius thanks to his plagarised versions. Plus it's a shame he got busted, he actually did collaborative works with tower of power and other western artists for Budokai 2, like tower of power youtube.com/watch?v=vZuUiJnuAtU
Then let's riot against everyone that ripped off the guy that discovered the major third interval.
Carter Gutierrez
>Plagiarism You just described western music...
Lucas Hernandez
>Plagiarism would be like Vanilla Ice ripping off Bowie/Queen with his Ice Ice Baby song, which directly rips the background instrumental from Under Pressure. Sampling is a thing you fucking idiot. Daft Punk made their whole career based on it. Learn some shit before spouting meme opinions on Chinese cartoon boards.
Jaxon Roberts
I always found Bridge Zone from SMS Sonic 1 to have an oddly high number of songs using a similar sounding motif.
Yuzo Koshiro "references" a lot of music, so I wouldn't be surprised if he heard one of these two back in the 80's and make it the focus for this theme.
I remember seeing that weird Bomberman sentai game for the PSP and the boss theme sounded a lot like a Hotline Miami song, but never saw anyone talking about it, of course the Bomberman game is fucking obscure;
Nolan Carter
dumbfuck, Vanilla Ice claimed for a long time that it was different and that it wasn't similar at all until he admitted it in an interview
Chase Morris
>SaMpLiNg MuSiC iS pLaGaRiSm
Jordan Robinson
>a lot of the music from Fallout 1 and 2 seems to be stolen from obscure tracks. Holy shit. You're right. Listen to these two and compare them. They are practically the same youtu.be/J4D-x2jSLmA?t=286 vs youtube.com/watch?v=wp2Hwi9qM48
Zachary Scott
Speaking of Bomberman. What's the deal with this track?
Daft punk at least asked the labels/musicians for permission as well. I think people get away with no legal action if they don't depending on the length and how transformed the sample is. That or that they're really small and don't get hit by lawyers That said, can people recommend me any good samplers? I already know guys like Nujabes or JSR's composer and Daft Punk.
Jackson Kelly
>like Led Zep which ended up getting sued for it. Never heard of this. What's the story?
Jeremiah Bailey
>Sister Marian >Mario Bros Goddamnit Nintendo, you fucking hacks
Ryder Baker
Based WHEN THE WIND IS LOW AND THE FIRE'S HOT
Angel Moore
I am more partial to his music for the SNES Butouden games. very memorable and catchy
William Flores
They are the same. One is just in a higher key.
Jayden Murphy
Ironically Nintendo is very anal about people using their stuff unless approved by them first. But it’s ok when Nintendo does it..
Jace Mitchell
kojima didnt write the music brainlet
Jace Long
>Tarintino Except that guy rips off like an expert that Kojima and his butt budy Refn could learn something from. Especially in his recent film where he likely ripped off/combined David Lynch, James Cameron's Titanic and Snoopy the dog into his style without anyone noticing and also highly understood how those directors work and studied their gimmicks. m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZiAiJBt75Q m.youtube.com/watch?v=VBAh8GXG868
Christopher Hall
daft punks use of samples is fantastic though
the one more time sample flip is really cool
David Lopez
youtu.be/gFHLO_2_THg?t=41 There were multiple suits for this, though they failed. Lots of blues musicians also said negative things about them for drawing very heavy inspiration. True "plagiarism" is a very subjective thing, but Led Zep are probably the most accused band of copyright infringement ever so honestly there's probably something to it.
Jaxon Long
Sampling is thing. A multi-million dollar one. If you knew anything about the history of the industry you would know that Ice, Ice baby was a landmark case for musical copyright infringement, becauase Vanilla Ice settled out of court, was forced to pay damages to both Queen and Bowie and include all of their names in liner notes.
Ice, Ice Baby pretty much set the precedent that if you want to sample a song you have to get it approved, pay for it, and give the original artists their proper credit.
My theory is that many of these early videogame composers had no standard to go by when they were assembling music for games. "Video game music" wasn't a thing. It makes sense for them to include catchy riffs from music they were listening to at the time, and then add a personal touch.
Additionally, it was incredibly difficult to program music for the NES. It's very hard to experiment with music when the method for playing the instrument is so clunky, confusing and limited. Even if these guys had ideas for wha they wanted Mario to sound like, it would be extremely time consuming and difficult to play around with the sound chip and try achieve what they might have had in their heads.
Elijah Lee
That's fine though as his versions are better.
Parker Ross
>thinking ice ice baby rips off anything
when its that fucking blatant its just basic sampling to make something new. You might as well be mad at every single 90s hip hop producer
Juan Thompson
This. It's so easy to let influences slip into your subconscious. Making music in my case is more abstract than just drawing because I sort of just freestyle/hum something until I think the melody sounds good, but sometimes I'm accidentally humming a tune of a song I've already heard.
>1-2 seconds of two unrelated songs sound vaguely and barely similar to each other >ZOMG THIEF!!1!11!!! EVERYONE'S A HACK SUE MIYAMOTO As a composer, I sincerely hate everyone who thinks like this.
