This is one of the many stories behind the maintenance of long-standing pages on this blog, one that -for a reason or another- has been pushed back up until today.
Hopefully, I'll be persuasive enough for you to be receptive of why the pushback for this song in particular has occurred to begin with...
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AC11/11 Asia DS2 Plus/STH (iOS DLC) |
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★4 185 |
★5 227 |
★7 465 |
★8 684 |
- |
150.25
splnkr (Spelunker)Back when we started making page for serialized song topics at hand, one of our first ones we've got a handful as to find an univocal categorization for its members is what is today the General Medleys Song Series Showcase page, whose very first version was about only the Namco-spawn medleys and eventually grew out to include each and every song with "Medley" in the title that wasn't already part of a sub-categorization of three-or-more songs already (ie. the Chain Chronicle medleys). One of the first items of contention about us blog editors back then was on whether to include or not songs that are actually medleys of the game but that just don't clearly spell it out on its title, which is the case of today's here song. Eventually, we settled down to have the 'Medley' part to be the main requirement for being elegible to join the General Medleys page, but as we've eventually accepted other game music medleys that only have the source game as its title without a 'Medley' in the title (ie. the Yokai Watch 2 music medley), I took on the mantle to look back to whatever other Game Music of the past has had a similar background that should be ported to the general page. Which leads us to today... years and years after that discussion took place and I accidentally remembered about it on this very day. I sure am not gonna get away with this via a minor series update with a brief update to be hurried away- this HAS to enter the blog-infamy history books on my part, and from the front door at that!
Now that the 'mea culpa' portion is out of the way, let's talk about one of the lucky orphaned titles of the infamous 1983 video games crash: Spelunker. Released in 1984 for Atari's 8-bit computers and Commodore 64, the game puts players in the shoes of the titular treasure-seeking spelunker, bound to explore up to six gaves divided into six 'levels' each by dodging guano-generating bats, chasing ghosts and keeping an eye for both air consumption (both to stay alive and to shoot enemies with) and tricky platforming. It was programmed from the key players of the MicroGraphic Image development company, born out of one of the many companies of the time that were devoted to diluite the Atari 2600 gaming ecosystem with as many cheap titles as possible, prior to the ET-spearhaded gaming crash. Tim Martin and Robert Barber were the game's developers, biting at the project while releasing other games under contract for a number of companies, including the tabletop-affine Parker Brothers and the edutainment software company Broderbund. Business, however, didn't go well for MicroGraphic Image over time, to the point of Martin finishing the project and mastering the level logic by himself and releasing the game for the C64/Atari 8-bit platforms, with Brotherbund as its publisher.
In order to clear out the bankrupt company's debt, Martin also ended up assisting into the original game's porting process for later systems, ultimately resulting into Brotherbund-licensed ports for the NES, the MSX and as a coin-op arcade, each published by Japanese company Irem. These ports in particular were the ones to launch the game into the "hidden gem" status for the Japanese audience, calling dibs on Japan-exclusive sequels for arcade rooms and the NES, each with their own title and distinctly playing in a different way than the original and each other: 1986's Spelunker II: 23 no Kagi arcade and 1987's Spelunker II: Yūja e no Chōsen for the NES. The situation insisted well into the 2000s, where most of the later-released Spelunker titles became Japan-first releases, most notably its NES Virtual Console reissuing for Wii/Wii U/3DS, the PS3-debuting Spelunker HD remake and its later revisions and the 2015 free-to-play sequel Spelunker World, eventually getting reissued as a microtransactionless title 2 years later and for additional platforms as Spelunker Party!.
With the original versions of Spelunker only starring an arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition as its title music and nothing else outside the 'Ghost' ditty for when the ghost chases the player around (both made by Tim Martin), the uncredited composers at Irem handled sound management across the later-released arcade and NES/MSX ports, the base for the later reissuings/HD versions. One of the factors weighting in for the 'hidden gem' status it got in Japan was the game's brutal difficulty owed to the titular Spelunker in the (NES) game dying from basically anything on the screen, something the same Irem company jumped on with a "Spelunker-sensei" (スペランカー先生) web comic in 2011-2015 that revolves around cheap death jokes. The joke was also caught at Namco's for the Taiko emblezonment of the song in the 2nd arcade generation, as it can be best described as a "Let's Play" medley across Stage 1 and its many SFX and many, MANY deaths along the ride. Five to be exact, and each punctuated by Go-Go Time bursts in-gameplay, no less! When the death cycle hits players with this medley and once the eyes are gorging upon the custom dancers set the song has got across its playable ports, you'll realize how former Taiko Team member Kuboken (くぼけん)'s charts for the song heavily play the death-by-a-million-cuts attrition war with barrages of 1/16 clusters that prey at the donders' stamina prowess. It's just like playing the source game, one might say!
