Nintendo Gigaleak Leads to Fans Restoring Super Mario World's Soundtrack

The gift that keeps on giving

News by LG18 on Feb 06, 2021

Off the back of an unprecedentedly large Nintendo leak from a couple of years ago, enthusiasts have discovered yet another hidden treasure.

Super Mario World,

Original sound files used for Super Mario World's soundtrack have emerged from what has been termed the Nintendo Gigaleak -- a huge volume of data that surfaced on 4chan in 2018 (with the most significant content appearing last year).

Due to the 16-bit hardware limitations of the time, the game's chiptune music was compressed in order for it to fit within the confines of a SNES cartridge. In light of the leak, however, fans have been able to faithfully recreate Koji Kondo's music to sound as it was intended.

After painstakingly sifting through the files, a Twitter user known as The Brickster managed to match a series of file names to the associated audio data. These files came from Super Mario Advance, a port of the original game for the Gameboy Advance:

"For anyone curious as to how these findings were done, it's actually rather simple. Know how the Gigaleak had source code for Super Mario Advanced? That game reuses samples from Super Mario World. Those samples had names we didn't have, which is how we were able to find them." -- The Brickster

Along with a few friends, Brickster then plugged these sounds into a sequencer and got to work remaking the soundtrack. The results spoke for themselves: high-fidelity, uncompressed versions of Kondo's most popular pieces.

You can listen to the finished product on YouTube:

A year on from when the most interesting part of the leak emerged, evidently the revelations show no sign of slowing down. Interest gained momentum when cut content from Pokemon Gold and Silver was discovered, which was followed by disclosure of a Star Fox 2 prototype and documents alluding to discarded Game Cube console designs.

It's all become somewhat of a moral dilemma within the community, with the most damning accusations of theft on one side and blame placed on Nintendo for lack of transparency on the other.

Nintendo has not commented on any of the leaks so far. It is currently unclear if and how the company will change internally, but we'll keep you up to date on any further developments.

Linden Garcia,
Editor, NoobFeed

For more of today's gaming news, check out our other articles such as Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Announced or Known Assassin's Creed Valhalla Issues Under Investigation.

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Linden Garcia

Subscriber, NoobFeed

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