I Fight Dragons' video-game inspirations
If the nerd is the new superhero, the nerd's soundtrack is I Fight Dragons—the band released its first album in February, and it slays the notion that countless hours playing video games are all for naught. Cool Is Just A Number isn't an album produced by the socially inept high-schooler who has trouble getting the girl. Instead, it's what he wrote when he grew up. Combining traditional rock instrumentation with video-game sounds, or chip tunes, the band's performances rely heavily on Nintendo equipment such as the Power Pad, Zapper, and Power Glove. To some, those are just old toys. Yet the music is anything but childish—most video-game composers based their work on classical and orchestral music, so the result is as rich and layered as anything else. Before I Fight Dragons plays The Cubby Bear on Friday night, lead vocalist-guitarist Brian Mazzaferri, fellow vocalist-guitarist Mike Mentzer, and Nintendo wizard Bill Prokopow share a few video-game themes that haunt them from childhood (in good or bad ways) and find their way into the band's work.
A classic that sticks
Bill Prokopow: For me, it's the classic Super Mario Bros. When I hear those sounds nowadays, they bring me back to when I was a kindergartener. In a similar way to when you smell something distinctive, it brings you back to that place where you were so many years ago. I think a lot of people can relate to the music and can feel nostalgic about it because it's so innocent. Even the bad guys were always cute in a way. They were never too evil. There was some beautiful consistency in that as a child.
Brian Mazzaferri: The biggest stuff for me is the Final Fantasy franchise. It had a huge effect on me, mostly because they were all role-playing games. I would spend hours and hours and hours with this music, just hearing the battle scene over and over again. The music stays with you, and the Final Fantasy stuff especially…. They were able to make those, kind of, majestic sounds within those limitations of sound-making. Final Fantasy was one of the things I talked with Bill about when we were trying to make some of the sounds for "With You." It's kind of unique in the original Nintendo Entertainment System canon.
BM: On the flipside, I would say one that I liked a lot—but would just get stuck in my head and I would end up being very angry about—is Bubble Bobble. I love it, and I hate it. It's really pretty, but it is, really, that song that never ends. It's these very short phrases that are all so playful and very circular in nature—they end where they start. It's got this, like, perfect symmetry. It almost feels like you're inside a music box.
Mike Mentzer: On Game Boy, Castlevania is one of my favorite themes of all time. I went through batteries like it was my job playing it. It's just so eerie, and it fits the mood so well with such a limited amount of sounds. Imagine you're watching a Dracula movie, and you've got that palette of sounds—you could use strings, you could use anything in an orchestra, but now you have to do it on a Game Boy, which is three notes at a time and then a channel of noise. And you have to create that same atmosphere. That's why it was so special to me. It created a very clear image, and a very clear feeling of what I was supposed to feel while I was playing the game.
BM: The king for me of the charge-up themes are the Mega Man themes, especially Mega Man 2. They're just, like, nonstop, frenetic, charge-and-go action. It starts out very slowly with this, sort of, dreamy arpeggio. All of a sudden, you've got a driving, high pedal tone. It's basically like a big slide upward—it's a gallop rhythm that continues to push and push and push. You come out of it feeling so keyed up. With a lot of our songs, musically, the idea is, we want people to come out with that charged-up, I'm-going-to-go-conquer-the-world feeling.
