Sense of Place: Meet the composer behind 'Super Mario Kart'

XPN | By Raina Douris,

Published August 23, 2024 at 8:40 AM EDT

Super Mario Bros Luigi and Mario pose at the "SUPER NINTENDO WORLD" welcome celebration.

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:

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.)

Soyo Oka, composer of the <em>Super Mario Kart </em>soundtrack. — Soyo Oka, composer of the *Super Mario Kart* soundtrack.

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.

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Raina Douris

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She was also involved with Canada's highest music honors: hosting the Polaris Music Prize Gala from 2017 to 2019, as well as serving on the jury for both that award and the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.

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Kimberly Junod

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).

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