Nintendo Music Update Adds 26 "Old-School" NES And Famicom Game Albums

Is that the entire "before Super Mario Bros." Famicom catalog? Family BASIC (if that even had a soundtrack) is the only thing I spot missing.
Wait, it doesn't have Popeye no Eigo Asobi or Spartan-X (Kung Fu). (The latter was at least concurrent with SMB1 in development.)

I appreciate them not making us wait separate weeks for the CluClu Land and Gyromite soundtracks.

This is actually pretty cool! I've been loving the app, honestly. I like to listen to it while I'm working. And it really helps me to appreciate the music more, because I'm listening to it isolated and without the distraction of the game.

*Extends Gyromite's "Game A BGM" to 60 minutes...

This was a pleasant (and funny) surprise, that's for sure! 🤣

@KingMike does Family BASIC even HAVE music?

I'm glad we got these out of the way because I actually wanted some of these games on here and I wasn't ready for the comments if Ice Climber had taken up the one game a week slot.

@N00BiSH I don't know. I though it might've had some kind of sample game but I'm not sure.

No joke; I literally recommended / predicted this somewhere else, specifically as a celebration of the NES' 42nd Anniversary (specifically from the JP standpoint; which is exactly why they did this); and it actually went through. As a retro gamer from the 2000's; I love this. It's actually a positive they did all of these at once, so we can shift more of a focus towards singular releases with nearly similar song quantities as this combined.

Here's hoping for another Animal Crossing album somewhere down the line.

P.S. In spite of recommending / predicting these, the second NES Zelda and Punch-Out!! didn't make it. There's always another tomorrow. 😄.

"Got a Duck!" from Duck Hunt is such a banger

Well now, ok... I'll take it. Still looking forward to StarTropics and Super Metroid. Maybe they can start releasing the 8 and 16 bit games en masse like this more often.

@kerplunk

Your comment and your profile picture lead me to believe you're actually this guy...

@KingMike Popeye and Spartan-X at least have valid excuses for not showing up--they're external licenses (Popeye to his comic strip origin with music originating from earlier adaptations, Spartan-X to the film "Wheels on Meals"), meaning Nintendo doesn't own the music that originated from their respective source materials and earlier adaptations. Odds are if either one of them were to show up with a playlist, it'd be a stripped-down playlist of music that Nintendo does own--and there's no guarantee that there's any game-original tunes in those games, and no guarantee that Nintendo would actually own such game-original tunes if there were.

Any other external license Nintendo took out is also unlikely to ever show up on Nintendo Music for similar reasons; don't expect to see Hamtaro or Eyeshield 21 game soundtracks on Nintendo Music anytime soon, and if there were to be a PlayStation counterpart to this service, we wouldn't expect their Bleach stuff to show up there...

I definitely had to fire this up, because I couldn't remember any Duck Hunt music 😂 But they actually left out the most important track! The dog laughing at you for missing rage bait.

I’ve been waiting/hoping for them to release something like this. Very cool.

Very happy to see Balloon Trip in the mix.

Cannot check right now, but the Clu Clu Land music is only vanilla CCL or does it include the Arcade music? Which was then used for the Famicom Disk System release.

EDIT: Sadly it doesn't have the Clu Clu Land Disk System music. Similarly, Ice Climber doesn't have the music of the arcade/FDS music and it seems VS. Excitebike (the FDS version, the arcade original uses the NES/FC music) will be a separate listing.

@shiningpikablu252 Now that you mention it, for something like Jump Super Stars and Jump Ultimate Stars, there's a minimum chance. As far as I know the music in those games is original and none-taking from the animes of the mangas represented, which means the music (and other elements of the game) are owned by Nintendo and Ganbarion.
Though in Jump Ultimate Stars, specific stages such as those from Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto or Saint Seiya have music meant to sound similar to that of the animes, but they're still original compositions.

They probably would just have to get a license from Shueisha to use the name JUMP and to show the characters and stages. But given they partially own the music, I imagine it wouldn't be much of a hassle to deal with the licenses. If Shueisha doesn't agree, at the very least they could negotiate to show only the box arts.

However, things like the Ouendan games and Elite Beat Agents are definitely out of the question unless they add only the original songs: Title Screens, Menus, Tutorials, Maps, Pre-Stage Custcenes, Stage Clears and Endings.

Between the 3 games, it would be about 24 songs in total.

Literally was just humming the excitebike theme in my head today!!

This is nice!! My first ever console was a NES with 5 pre-owned games (all of us kids got it to share):

Mach Rider
Soccer
Excitebike
Ice Climber
Duck Hunt

Not long after I got to borrow Golf and Tennis for serious amounts of time from a neighbour, and also tried Baseball and short stints of fun with Balloon Fight and Clu Clu Land. All of which are on this list.

The year after we got our 6th game (1st new game = not pre-owned), which was Super Mario Bros, and I also got into The Last Ninja, California Games etc on the neighbour's Commodore 64, but for that first full year those games tided me over with my first strong gaming memories.

Thanks for the nostalgia trip!

I can't listen to the Donkey Kong theme without expecting the Donkey Kong Country intro beats to kick in!

It's funny DKC portrayed the original Donkey Kong as so ancient with Cranky and his Gramophone. Date wise it was equivalent to a game from 2011 today!

It's worth mentioning that all of these soundtracks are from 1985 and earlier; nothing newer than that. I think this covers every single first-party NES game up to 1985 (aside from SMB1 which was already on there). I appreciate that we got these all at once instead of one a week.

@kerplunk "Got a duck" is mere seconds long. Troll post?

Ah yes, or as I like to call this addition: The Greatest Bleeps & Bloops.

I think it's great that they combined this entire set of games, seeing as they don't have much in the way of songs in them. Are we finally going to get anything Xenoblade related soon? Or Fire Emblem: Three Houses?

The Golf "music" is hilarious, go and have a listen.

Song of the Year: https://m.nintendo.com/shared/en-GB/GB/tracks/1a6554b6-b771-4c44-9c0e-c3de0fc8ef38

On the plus side, this is 26 weeks we've avoided where Nintendo go, "This week, here's 1 NES soundtrack. Enjoy!"

This is fun! Can't believe they did this, but I'm. Really happy with it!

@Suketoudara I'll be heading that randomly in my head for the rest of the day! 🤣

I also sincerely hope Nintendo will put Nintendo Music on Switch 2 as an app, and a desktop/webversion for PC... It's one of my biggest wishes now.

Nice additions that will bring some of us WAY back to the day. I imagine people can use these tracks to sprinkle a lot of variety and fun interstitials into their custom playlists.

This is super cool ngl.

Wow, impressive. Now we're talking.

@Pillowpants They should and let us use songs from it on the menu and eShop

I approve of this. It’s not terribly exciting for me to wait a week and get a single nes album, so uploading a bunch of them at once, good move

@Pillowpants If your PC is running Windows 11, you can install the Android app.

@Jack_Goetz Thanks for the tip! That might do the trick for my private PC. A webversion would be great for my work laptop, as I can't install apps on it.

It still feels like Nintendo Music with extra steps, though. Unneccesary steps.

WHOA!! Over 1 hour of music!!

This is a fun spread of classics but that tag line is hilarious.

@Privatkatze Yeah, just a joke! Really do love a lot of the tracks, though. I love the early NES stuff.

@Joe11 it's called Miss, it won't show up normally unless you go under More From This Game.

I binged all the beeps & boops, when are we gonna get some Xenoblade or Star Fox 2?

@Privatkatze On iTunes you can buy Final Fantasy soundtracks, and you can also buy individual tracks which means you can pay 99 cents or $1.29 or whatever for the "rest at an Inn" track.
I'm sure the Pokemon soundtracks have some very short music. I think even the level-up jingle is considered "music".

So, yes, that has happened before.

More music, more retro games with more console generations, more features on Switch 2 with Game Chat...

I wonder when they'll raise the price of the subscription... :/