Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/09/oddly-familiar-video-game-tune.html
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You posted just for the Chrono Trigger/Rick Astley part didn’t you @beschizza?
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Hat dug, I can hardly believe I haven’t heard this before. Always something new, isn’t there?
Someone once pointed out that there’s a curious resemblance between St. Thomas by Sonny Rollins and a riff from “Chill” in Dr. Mario, but I think it’s easy to write that off as parallel evolution. Much less disputable (but oddly not often referenced) is the coincidence of the theme from Little Shop of Horrors and the title screen music.
It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the title. I haven’t even watched the video yet.
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Fortunately, none of the 1980’s games for which I coded music were popular enough to attract any attention from the legal community… 
Popular enough to sell more copies would have been nice. 
Of course, these were the days when C was radical: what!?! you can run your program on more than one type of computer?!! Awesome! What… just xmodem the listing over the null modem cable?
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Looks like they get to the Friendship swipe in the second video in the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AVON5QSivI
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That Friendship song is pretty dope, really digging it. I’ll have to check out that group.
Also about that Never Gunna Give You Up thing. Of course Rob posted this just because of that, was the first thing that came to my mind when it started playing.
Okay, we might have lifted the theme from somewhere…
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That’s pretty darn nifty! Is there more information about that company and its history out there? Google turns up scant information.
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Basically a company that got into actual game development after it became a little too illegal to import clone knock-offs.
We made a nice 68000 prototype gaming system, but that was a bit too much for the company to bite off.
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Soooo… what you’re saying is that I can “Rickroll” people using the “Chrono Trigger” soundtrack? Cool.
Given modern copyright law interpretation (especially after the Marvin Gaye/Pharrell case), these are all lawsuits waiting to happen. In a few cases deservedly, admitted, but mostly that would just be unfortunate.
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Or we can follow the way of thinking from the Blurred Lines case and say that since all of these video game themes have the same feel as the original song, they are all infringers. Off with their heads!
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Clearly I didn’t play enough video games in the 90s, since I don’t recognise what’s supposed to have borrowed from the Friendship song. But the first few notes did put me in mind of the funky theme of The South Bank Show with its Variations on Paganini by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Which may show something about copying the greats. Or not.
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I watched the Star Wars triology and played A Link to the Past incessantly in my youth and never made the connection about the Death Mountain theme and the Imperial March.
The Spy Hunter theme is the Peter Gunn Theme, so that’s not a “sounds similar” so much as a direct reference. They licensed it because they couldn’t get the license for James Bond.
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Back in the Sixties, my mum had an LP that had the Sean Connery Bond movie themes on one side and a selection of other themes on the B side, one of which was Peter Gunn. I don’t think it was before the Bond movies came out on VHS that I finally grokked that that theme had nothing to do with Bond. I don’t think the music lobe of brain is fully convinced even yet.
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it goes the other way, too. I’m sure there’s hundreds but these are some early ones that I know.
Smif & Wessun (as Cocoa Brothers) rapped over an obvious Mario sample for “Super Brooklyn” in the late 90s.
A little more interesting was Diplo’s first single, “Diplo Rhythm,” a hot club track on his otherwise trip-hop 2004 debut album, which was his signature drum programming over a sped-up sample of the Platoon NES game.
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Hmm…I wonder why that Sonic 3 song sounds like “Hard Times” by the Jetzons…
Oh, it’s because Brad Buxer, the keyboardist for the Jetzons and Michael Jackson’s musical director, worked with Jackson on the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
From the Sonic 3 Wikipedia page:
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The folks behind the ‘rebooted’ DuckTales cartoon are a bunch of shameless nerds for everything DuckTales and the extended duck universe, a perfect example being this tribute to the old DuckTales NES game…
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It’s a real shame they didn’t include my favorite pop music / video game soundtrack correlation:
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