Soyo Oka on World Cafe
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World Cafe
Sense of Place: Meet the composer behind ‘Super Mario Kart’
Composer Soyo Oka talks about reluctantly going from her university’s composition school to writing video game music and how the impact of her music around the world came as a surprise to her
If you walk around Tokyo for long enough, chances are you’ll see tourists cosplaying as Mario, Yoshi or maybe Bowser pull up at a busy intersection.
It’s a way for people to live out a real-life version of the massively popular Nintendo game. Released in 1992, Super Mario Kart sold nearly 9 million copies around the world, and since then, there have been nine sequels and multiples generations of fans. We’re willing to bet a lot of those fans will recognize this music:
[SNES Music] Super Mario Kart Full Original Soundtrack (Mastered in Studio)
Soyo Oka | courtesy of the artist
As part of our Sense of Place: Japan series, we sat down with Soyo Oka, the composer behind the soundtrack to the original Super Mario Kart. Oka shares her journey, from studying classical music at Osaka College of Music and falling in love with the synthesizer to literally calling up Nintendo in search of a job. (Spoiler: She got the job.)
Many thanks to interpreter Hideko Morita for their help with this session. Stay tuned for more dispatches from Sense of Place: Japan.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.