July Nintendo Direct removed three games at the last minute claim insiders
Video game rumours have become a cottage industry in recent years, with almost no major annoucement being made without first being leaked earlier. As a result, certain sources have become known as more reliable than others, so when NatetheHate said there would be a Nintendo Direct in late July most people believed him.
He was right too, although in the end it turned out to be a Partner Direct, featuring only third party games, which is not what anyone anticipated.
However, he's subsequently revealed that not only did he not know it was Partner Direct but neither did the publishers involved, in an interesting insight into how the video game rumourmill works and how close Nintendo, in particular, keeps things to their chest.
According to NatetheHate, third party publishers are told they're in a Nintendo Direct but not the format of the show, presumably to stop leaks.
Normal Nintendo Directs, featuring first party games, usually always feature at least some third party titles, so there's no way for publishers to know what the format will be, unless Nintendo tells them.
Nintendo probably tells large companies like Square Enix, who are a close ally and had three titles in the Partner Showcase, but assuming NatetheHate's source is a smaller publisher it seems they're told as little as possible.
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What's also interesting is how late in the day Nintendo seems to have made the decision about what would and wouldn't be in the Direct.
This uncertainty has been common practice since the day of live reveals at E3, with publishers having multiple options that they only decide on literally at the last minute. Which is why even usually good sources can get information wrong when it comes to reveal events.
The Game Business's Christopher Dring didn't participate in the initial rumours, but after the Direct he revealed that there were 'at least three games' that he was told were '100%' going to be a part of the Partner Showcase. More Trending
His source was the publishers themselves, which implies the actual Direct was as big a surprise, and disappointment, to them as it was to everyone else.
Dring gave no indication of what any of the games were, but many fans were disappointed that previously announced games such as Elden Ring and Final Fantasy 7 Remake were not part of the event.
That doesn't guarantee they were amongst the games cut at the last minute but perhaps the bigger question is why did Nintendo remove them and when will they be revealed?
With the Direct featuring so few big name titles it's hard to understand why Nintendo went through with the event at all, and didn't just postpone it to later, but then understanding Nintendo has always been near impossible, even with insider leaks…
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Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. The first question I asked Rosen was the very obvious one of how The 8-Bit Big Band got started, but his answer got cut off in the recording. Given it was such an interesting story, I got him to write it down and email it later. CR: In 2017 I took a trip to Japan on vacation. When I go to a new country, I like to buy a traditional instrument from the region and take a lesson on it from somebody who knows the music from that area. So when I went to Japan in Kyoto, I happened to be staying on the same block as a musical instrument store that sells traditional Japanese instruments and so I bought a shamisen. In Tokyo, a friend of mine connected me with a musician there who plays shamisen and koto, and he generously gave me a lesson. After the lesson, I saw a soundtrack on his desk for a game series in Japan that was only ever translated a few times in the US called Ganbare Goemon or Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon in the States and I said, I love that soundtrack! He said, 'Do you like video game music?' and I said, 'Yes, I do.' He then, as a gift, gave me a copy of his album, which was all video game music arranged for Japanese traditional instruments. His group is called Famikoto, a portmanteau of Famicom (the name of the NES in Japan) and koto, the instrument. When I listened to it on the plane, that gave me the idea to create a video game music album of my own using my vocabulary with large jazz ensemble, which is my main instrumental arranging skillset here in the United States, that I frequently employ in New York in the world of musical theatre and beyond. When I returned home, I immediately began work on about nine or 10 arrangements. A video game music songbook for big band jazz ensemble and those 10 arrangements became the first album. GC: I've had a couple of very interesting discussions with the composer Eímear Noone, where we've talked about how modern video game music is very heavily influenced by modern cinematic soundtracks, but I've always resented this because I feel it erases the long, proud history of video game music, which is very distinctive and helped inspire modern electronic music like synthwave. So, I'm so glad to see projects like yours celebrating that tradition, even if it is through a very specific prism. Because when people say they're a fan of video game music nowadays, I'm never sure what they actually mean. CR: Yeah, it's really interesting the nomenclature we use surrounding a lot of this stuff. It's similar to saying… I work a lot in the Broadway industry. So people say, 'Oh, I love cast albums, I love Broadway shows.' When really, in this day and age – and it's true of film scores too – is it a genre? I don't know. Because what we do in various mediums that involve using music for storytelling purposes, is we take any genre of music and then we repurpose it for the sake of dramatic storytelling or visual storytelling or dramatising a scene or underscoring a scene and increasing the emotion, using the vocabulary from a genre and deriving it as a function within a different context of media. And so a Broadway show can be any genre, depending on the show. A video game can be any genre, depending on the game. A film can be any genre, depending on the film. And so, it's like you like a genre, but it's not really a genre. It's any genre really. It's just it's being delivered to you to the function of this particular form of media. However, what you're touching on is interesting because for the first… because video game music is still a new field, so to speak, because it just started, really, in the eighties, and we had this period where there was severe technological limitations on the way that this music was made and could be distributed. It did also, inherently, create a genre and a sound, which could have been called video game music, but I think now is more referred to as chiptune music, right? GC: Yeah, yeah. CR: However, one could argue, now video games do not have those technological limitations, and so they now are just scoring for media like anything else. And the thing that I think still makes it video game music is the function of that music in a way where it's not linear. And so they have to compose music for games that allows the player to be the film editor, to be the orchestrator, to be the mixing engineer, because their player input is the thing that dictates the changes in the music. So that's a different way of thinking about composing. So you could define video game music like that, in the modern era, that it's interactive music, it's non-linear music. It's music that is chance music; it's aleatoric, if you want to use a collegiate music term. GC: Oh, hark at you! CR: [laughs] The other thing is interesting because that is still a sound that is at the core of video game music. And it's funny, there's somebody that I work with, that's like my foil basically, where I'll take songs from the 16-bit era, and the 8-bit era, and turn them into probably what they would've been if the technology had been available. But then my friend Jake Silverman, _buttonmasher, he's the opposite. He takes modern video game music, and other things, and he chiptunes them. He's fully a chiptune artist. He programs them in chiptune software on vintage cartridges, so they sound authentic. He does the opposite. So he's thoroughly keeping that traditional… what would've been considered video game music, chiptune sound alive. So there's a scene for both. GC: One of the things that always interests me, is that with those old tunes, when they're orchestrated you realise that some of the noises that were in the original version were supposed to be specific instruments, like a guitar or whatever. But I kind of didn't want to know that. By making it definitively a real-world instrument you're losing that interesting ambiguity, that need for interpretation of what you're listening to. CR: I think that's what makes a really great arrangement, is that there's still something that is a journey that surprises a listener. Ultimately, speaking abstractly about what an arrangement should do or what an arranger is, It's not just translating. Like you're saying, one-to-one, being like, 'Now that's guitar and that will be flute and that will be…' from the chiptunes. That is boring. And so I think what a great arranger really does is hear the unrealised potential in a piece of music. So the thing that I actually really like about working with these old chiptunes is that they were so limited. They had only three notes to play at a time, 45 seconds long. And so it's less about, for me, translating one-to-one – like that will become this instrument – and more like those are the scaffolding of the arrangement. This is exactly what I do in Broadway shows. All Broadway shows start on piano only and all the stuff's represented just in the piano. And then the orchestrator has to see through that and hear the potential and be like, 'Yes, I understand the feeling of what you're going for with your melody and your chord changes and your very basic 45 second motif. Now how can I as the arranger… if you, as the composer or the architect of the building, you've built this thing, now as the arranger it's sort of like, 'Okay, well that's all well and good, now let's blow out this wall and make it an open floor plan and lemme bring in this kind of furniture and then let's add a second floor. We're going to add a staircase, but it's all going to be in this style. Because I hear you as the composer, you're going for this vibe and the style of music. Now let me take that and run with it and introduce other elements that will expand upon your original idea and not just make a sort of facsimile of it with a different instrument. That, I think, is what inspired arrangement does. Arrangers play with parameters to create an interesting listening experience over time. And it's especially important with video game music because we're removing it from its original context and its function, as a way to enhance storytelling through gameplay. If you're not sitting there interacting with the game, the arrangement has to do more heavy lifting to give it an interesting journey to just listen to independently. GC: I think something like your version of Bubblegum K.K. [the Spotify version doesn't have K.K. singing on it – GC] is really impressive because I can't stand K.K. Slider's stuff, even though I'm a big Animal Crossing fan, but that is a really lovely tune that you've teased out of it. CR: Yeah, it's like the K.K. songs… that's exactly what I do in a Broadway show. Some composer or songwriter plays the guitar or the piano and they write a little song and then I take their song and… I mean K.K. Slider could have just been a Broadway composer. GC: [laughs] I'm just thinking back to the conversation I had with Eímear Noone, where I was trying to diplomatically describe how I was sick and tired of the modern obsession with sub-Hans Zimmer style, non-melodic rubbish. CR: [laughs] GC: And I mentioned how I noticed how so much Nintendo music is heavily jazz influenced. It can't just be Koji Kondo because it's all the time. Like, the remake of Mario Vs. Donkey Kong is filled with some really smooth jazz tracks, for no apparent reason. CR: The Mario Kart World soundtrack is basically a big band fusion album. GC: Yeah, it's great! CR: All those composers, I think, were highly influenced by the still massive Japanese jazz fusion scene of the eighties and nineties, and we're still seeing the result of that. GC: Eímear knows her stuff, she was describing how a lot of American musicians in the eighties and nineties were learning at a jazz school, I think it was in L.A., and that's why there's so many memorable TV and movie tunes in the eighties, because there was such an emphasis on melody. And that strikes me as very similar to video games, because the point was you could listen to the Knight Rider theme, or whatever, a hundred times and never get sick of it. CR: Yeah, it's like melody forward, melody forward. And that's why my fans get mad at me because I sort of tend to gravitate towards Nintendo, but it's because they have themes and melodies and harmony that are the most translatable to being arranged. Because you can take apart all the set dressing, take out all the furniture, take down all the decorations off the wall, and the melody is just super strong and the chord changes are super strong and they're recognisable no matter what you do to them, because they're composed in this idiom that takes to arrangements really well, as opposed to a lot of other modern film scoring sounding games, like you're describing, that are very textural and symphonic and… you know… GC: Boring? CR: [laughs] Yeah… exactly. Not just for arranging, because they're not melody forward. There's a big Japanese jazz fusion band in the seventies and eighties and nineties called T-Square. Do you know about them? GC: I don't think so. CR: Yeah, this band, T-Square is a very, very influential Japanese jazz fusion band over there, that highly influenced a lot of video game music composers. And the members of T-Square play on all these Nintendo soundtracks, and like Masato Honda is the sax player of T-Square. He's the guy that plays that Cowboy Bebop solo that everyone loves, the saxophone solo, and they all play on a lot of Nintendo soundtracks and stuff. Yeah, T -Square is a big thing. Koji Kondo cites T-Square as a lot of inspiration for his stuff. GC: Another more obvious question but what do you consider to be your best track, your best arrangement? And I'll tell you whether you're right or not. CR: [laughs] That is really tough. That's a real Sophie's choice. I mean, I will say that as the seven years have gone by, I think my craft as an arranger has gotten more honed in and more interesting and more efficient. That's tough. I mean, I really… I think doing Still Alive in the style of Frank Sinatra is pretty inspired. I really like Pollyanna, which we did on the last one, but also Tifa's Theme came out really beautifully. I think the modal jazz Song Of Storms is a good one. I don't know, Rosalina In The Observatory is really beautiful. GC: I really liked the OutRun one you did, which I didn't think would work. That's a very distinctive sound, but it's not jazz. But it totally worked for me. CR: Yeah, and I remember somebody suggesting that in the Discord and being like, 'Oh, this is cool.' I actually admittedly have never played OutRun but it was a really cool sound. And that's the perfect combination of dedicated fans of OutRun, but not so popular. That was the perfect slightly B-side video game music one to include the GC: What am I hearing?! OutRun is the crown jewels of video game music! The best of the best for MIDI music or whatever it was. CR: [laughs] GC: But I think Big Blue is my absolute favourite of yours. The saxophone solo in that is just incredible. It's the only one of your videos I don't really like, because the animation is too good and it covers up the saxophonist. CR: Yeah, yeah, Grace Kelly. GC: She's absolutely amazing. It's like… I've never heard a saxophone make that noise before and it goes on forever. CR: I started making a rule where the animators would get a little excited and I'd be like, 'Okay, but you have to back off a little bit. You can't just cover them.' GC: I think that helps to illustrate just how good the music is originally that you can do that with it. That and the Pokémon Battle music… I don't know why they went so hard with that, because that is an incredible tune. It goes so far beyond what was necessary. CR: [laughs] That Pokémon stuff, it's so chromatic and so intense. It's awesome. GC: This incredibly powerful music, all to illustrate a mouse hitting a pigeon. CR: [laughs] GC: But I'm also interested in the stuff you've done where you don't change nearly as much, like Lonely Rolling Star. Which I guess is because it was already very jazzy. CR: Yeah, exactly. The chord changes in that are already very jazz influenced. And I sort of like to do a little bit of each thing in the band, where I'll take some tunes and completely reimagine them and take them out of their original context and go crazy with them in completely different ways. And then I like to balance that with things that are a little bit more like, 'Let's just expand upon the original and I'll just inject my flavour on top of it.' But the original core of the feeling I like to maintain, it's depending on the song. So I like a balance. GC: The other one that impressed me was, I Want To Take You For A Ride, which in my head… that had lyrics, but it got re-released recently and I realised it's just that one line repeated again and again and again. CR: [laughs] It's a four bar loop. That's it. GC: So who wrote the lyrics for that? Was that you? CR: Do you know this band Lawrence? Have you heard of them? GC: No, I can't say I have. CR: It's sort of like a funk soul, younger band named Lawrence, that's gaining popularity very quickly here in the United States. And they've been doing some shows in London too, that have done quite well. They're selling very well, but they're a brother and sister whose last name is Lawrence, and they have this funk band and they're great, but I'm friends of theirs here in New York and they love The 8-Bit Big Band and I love their band and we're always talking about, 'Oh, we got to do something together.' And that loop of the 'I want to take you for a ride' has kind of become an internet meme. It is kind of an inside joke. And so I just had the idea where, 'Okay, well if that was the chorus of a song, what would the rest of the song sound like? And so, I sort of presented that idea to them and I'm like, 'What if we collaborated on this and turned it into a whole song?' And so they wrote the lyrics and the rest of the melody and then I took it and I arranged it into the track. And so we worked together on that. And they're the two of them that are the singers on that track. That's Lawrence, that's Clyde and Gracie Lawrence. GC: So just to clarify, you're just doing the one concert in the UK? CR: That's right. I'd like to do more but it's just one for now. GC: I don't say this in an accusatory way, but I don't think Americans or Japanese realise just how different the retro scene is in Europe and the UK. I'm the right age, but I never saw a NES in the flesh until I was in my twenties. It came out here late and was ridiculously expensive. CR: So it was ZX Spectrums…? GC: Yeah, and Commodore 64 and then later Amiga and Atari ST. And then during the 16-bit era consoles took over and things aligned more with the US, although the Mega Drive was always much more popular than the SNES. CR: I just want you to acknowledge that I did say zed-ex spectrum and not zee-ex Spectrum! GC: [laughs] Oh sorry! But to me you just said that normally, so it didn't register that you were making an effort! CR: [laughs] GC: So all we ever get is other people's nostalgia. We very rarely get treated to nostalgia for things that were actually popular at that time. But there are some, I say with some pride, some amazing UK chiptunes artist from that period. Do you know who Ron Hubbard and Martin Galway and Tim Follin are? CR: Tim Follin I know. I know Tim Follin. GC: He did some NES stuff, I think. CR: Woo! That stuff's awesome. I really want to cover some of that, either of the Follins, because that's some truly adventurous chiptune writing. Holy s***. GC: Would you consider doing a UK tune that presumably your core audience wouldn't have heard of? CR: It's funny, actually. My core audience on Discord, all the fans, they actually really loved Tim Follin. People really laud him all the time. GC: His Ghouls 'N Ghosts tracks are amazing. But there's one by Ron Hubbard, who I believe worked in the US in his later years, called Monty On The Run. That's considered the best chiptune from the UK. CR: Monty On The Run. Okay, I'm going to check it out. GC: It's on Spotify and seems to be official or semi-official. CR: Ron Hubbard, okay. GC: And the Ocean Loaders, I dunno, would you have heard of that from the Commodore 64? CR: Yeah, my Commodore 64 knowledge is not great… GC: Ocean Loader is on Spotify, which is Martin Galway. And then I think Speedball 2 is probably the best Amiga tune, but I couldn't find an official version of that. It's not very jazzy though, so I dunno how you'd ever do that. CR: You never know. That's the thing about being an arranger, is you hear something and you have this bag of musical soup in your brain and something hits it a certain way and you're like, 'Oh, what about this?' You just never know. GC: So what are you looking for now when you consider a new song? Are you looking for a challenge each time? At this point you've done most of the more obvious choices. CR: I still play a lot of games. And then in the fan Discord server, there's a suggestions channel where the kids are always hipping me to new games that are really cool that people love. GC: Never mind the kids, when are you going to do Bubble Bobble? CR: [laughs] I know that's a great one. That theme is very deeply ingrained in me, and that is actually a very good idea. GC: I think that's probably my favourite arcade tune, you can just listen to it endlessly. CR: That's a funny one. That's a good idea actually. I should do that. But it's like things like this, where you're just having a normal conversation and then something hits you in a way and it's like, 'Oh, I'll do that. That'll be fun!' And then over the course of a year or so… I actually do 8-Bit Big Band arrangements usually to procrastinate my actual arrangements that I have to do for my real career. GC: [laughs] I was just going to ask, when do you fit them in? CR: I fit them in when I should be doing other things. [laughs] And then I'll do two or three arrangements and then we'll schedule a recording session. We'll go in and record the tunes. We do that three or four times a year. And then we have an album. GC: I mean this in the best way possible but when I see your videos all I can think is, 'Why don't these have 10 times more viewers than they do?' Because they're fantastic. CR: I agree. I agree. [laughs] GC: Does it pay for itself? I mean, I guess it must do If you're touring? CR: Yes and no. The truth of the matter is I like… completely don't keep track, because first of all, I don't think anybody starts a jazz orchestra to get rich. That's certainly not going to happen. But I think if I were to do the math of all the money that I've spent on the recording sessions and the editing of the videos and the artwork and the musicians and the studio, probably I would still be pretty deeply in the red. But I don't want to know, because that's not why I do it. And I think from what I can tell, based on the revenue, the ad revenue, and the streaming revenue, if I stopped recording, if I stopped making new content, maybe I would break even in five, eight years. I don't know. It is at a point where I think it probably is self-sustaining, but I also don't know and I don't really want to know because I'm not doing it for that reason. I don't know. GC: Well, that's nice to hear. I greatly admire that. CR: I make money doing Broadway and musical theatre. That's how I pay the rent. And I like doing that, obviously, but that I'm very well aware of the finances of and The 8-Bit Big Band is… even though it has blown up to be a very major part of my life, still feels like a passion project. GC: That's nice to hear. But perhaps we could just end on a slightly more serious note. Is there anything you would advise video game composers in general, in order to keep video game music distinctive, while still moving forward and not being stuck in the past? CR: Well, I guess I would say the good news is you do have some game companies like Nintendo that are still theme driven, melody driven things. And also, the other good news is I feel like this problem, of all these AAA games just trying to sound and play like all these other AAA games that are feeling generic, like you're saying, the indie game scene is still pretty active and pretty innovating still in a way that is really good. I mean, have you played Shovel Knight or have you listened to the Shovel Knight album? GC: Oh yes, that's great. CR: That is serious music. I mean, that stuff is awesome. Wow! That Jake Kaufman, that composer… he is, for me, up there with the vintage pioneers of chiptune, like Tim Follin. His writing is incredible. I mean, it's like if Mozart wrote chiptune music. It sounds partially like good old-fashioned Mega Man and partially like Mozart's beautiful études and sonatas that are like, holy s*** man. So, I think the good news is there's people out there still doing it but, like you said, the bell curve has gotten big and the bigger it gets the more middle is just going to be mostly just generic. GC: But if you think back even just 20 years. Back then a lot of the big mainstream video games had memorable tunes. If you say the word Halo to me, I will immediately start humming the tune and I'm not even a particularly big Halo fan. CR: Right, that's true. GC: Or Metal Gear Solid, they all still had memorable melodies that would instantly flick something on in your head, which I would've thought was quite useful to companies. CR: I agree. I agree. Yeah, that is lost a little. I can't sing the main theme to… I don't know. Destiny? GC: Yeah, exactly. Destiny was such a drop from Halo. Maybe not technically but it's like… I not only can't hum any modern Final Fantasy tune, I probably couldn't even recognise it. CR: I've been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. GC: Oh well, that is fantastic in every way. CR: Yeah, that has a really cool soundtrack. That's really interesting. GC: Again, the only ones that are good are the ones that are purposely looking back at the past. And that seems a shame. More Trending CR: I know, it's sad that melody is considered retro. Maybe it'll swing, maybe we're just in a phase, it'll come back around. GC: Okay. Well thank you very much for your time. That is fascinating. I hope I wasn't too ignorant of your trade, but I personally really appreciate all your work. CR: Yeah, thanks for having me. GC: Thank you. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: 90s Amiga mascot is coming back with a sequel his original creator hates MORE: Baldur's Gate 3 devs reveal the weirdest and most bizarre fan stats MORE: Battlefield 6 beta isn't for two days but 9,000 people are already in the app
