Spotlight on: Nintendocore

Join us as we discover a new sub-genre of fun and old school noise.

Ever heard of the genre Nintendocore before? I wouldn't blame you if you haven't, it's not something that gets much, if any airtime on mainstream radio. I only discovered it by accident a year ago or so when I was doing some Metalcore related research and stumbled across it. I didn't dig any deeper at the time and forgot about it for the most part, until recently a few Nintendocore tracks worked their way into my Spotify discovery playlists. I'm now a convert.

Nintendocore, for those of you still scratching your head is any style of music that includes chiptone and 8-bit sound effects, but the bulk of the tracks I’ve discovered are heavily influenced by Hardcore Punk, Rock and Metalcore, hence the name.

​Video games and their tunes have always had some input into music, but it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that this underground sound started to get noticed and became its own genre.
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Mario approved

The first track that I really sat down and listened to was 'Those Creatures from Gannon are Pretty Bad' by Andri from Pagefire, a YouTuber who wrote and performed all the instruments on the song, and hired two vocalists and a mixer from Fiverr, made a mind boggling video, and the rest is history.

The track 'Those Creatures from Gannon are Pretty Bad' is on the Deathcore side of things, with growled lyrics and heavy instrumentals, but the fun part is the actual sound bytes from old school Nintendo games within the track, I noticed more than a few from Super Mario Brothers and some others I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But they don’t distract you from the song, but rather add a whole new layer of depth to it. 

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Nintendocore is considered a fringe genre, meaning the wider public have probably never heard of it before and has for the most part a small, but I think loyal, following of fans. I know there is at least one record label called N-Core Lives, whose sole focus is to promote bands and albums from the genre, but it deserves so much more attention. 

For people who enjoy their Core music with a hint of retro.
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​Written by Dan. 

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For more information on who did what on 'Those Creatures...', you can find it here.

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