NEStalgia X

Posted on by Jonny

Download (MP3)
Download (End card acoustic short: The Amazon)

It’s the 10th anniversary of the GaMetal NES Medley… get ready for NEStalgia X!

This year’s song line-up:

  1. Title Theme (Kid Icarus)
  2. Plant Man (Mega Man 6)
  3. Stage 2 (Gyruss)
  4. Character Select (Super Mario Bros. 2)
  5. BGM 03 (Yoshi)
  6. Stage 4 (Journey to Silius)
  7. The Amazon (DuckTales)
  8. Building Theme (Dick Tracy)
  9. Stage Theme 1 (Hi no Tori Hououhen: Gaou no Bouken)
  10. Yamato Man (Mega Man 6)
  11. Level Theme (T & C Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage)
  12. Round Theme (Wario’s Woods)
  13. Stage 9-2 (Kira Kira Star Night DX)
  14. Boss Theme (Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II)
  15. Detected! (Metal Gear)
  16. Overheat (Gradius II)
  17. Zone J (Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers)
  18. Ending Theme (Darkwing Duck)

At 18 total songs, this is the largest NES Medley to date! I wanted to make this one a little more special than usual, as it’s the 10th one and all.

For those unaware of how I choose the songs for the console medleys, here’s a quick breakdown and some NES Medley history for you. I’ve been doing NES Medleys since the first year of GaMetal, starting with the original NES Medley #1 back in 2009. This was a much smaller medley than pretty much every medley I’ve done after, with only 5 songs: the first level themes from Bionic Commando and Journey to Silius, Together We Ride from Fire Emblem, the Dungeon Theme from StarTropics, and the Main Theme from Bubble Bobble. All pretty much random picks from games/songs that I really liked.

While I was among the smallest of small time acts back then, this medley was one of my least viewed/listened to track from those days. So I was like.. ‘yea I probably won’t do another one of these anytime soon’.

Fast forward 5 years, and I decided to give it another shot. This time, however, I had other people choose the songs to go into the medley. If memory serves me correctly, I did this on Twitter. I still have a fairly small following, so it’s not like I was getting cascaded with thousands of submissions. From those that did respond, I chose 10 random songs, and made them into the smash GaMetal hit NES Medley #2.

Just kidding, it wasn’t actually a smash hit, but it was still pretty cool to fulfill requests for 10 people all at once. It also forced in some variety as it featured several songs from games/songs I was either unfamiliar with (like Werewolf: The Last Warrior and Gimmick!), or would’ve never thought to put into a medley (like Gemini Man, Fallin Love, or Ragnorak Canyon).

A year later, the GaMetal Patreon had been created, so I decided to move the song selection operations to the GaMetal Patrons, since they’re the lovely people mostly responsible for putting a roof over my head, feeding me, and funding the continued improvement of GaMetal (thank you Patrons!). Once again, 10 songs were chosen by people and made into the medley, along with 1 song I threw in myself (Quackerjack’s Bridge).

After that, I decided to make the NES Medley’s into an annual event, with the song lists put together by the GaMetal Patrons. The song count has also grown slightly over the years, averaging around 13-15 songs, sometimes even higher! We’ve also expanded into different console medleys over the last few years, like the most recent PSX and N64 Medleys.

For the last few years, there’ve been at least 13 tracks in the NES Medleys that always come from other people, with any extras being chosen by myself. Most of my selections these days come from the Patron submission pool that didn’t get chosen to be in the Medley, only occasionally being from something not submitted at all.

This year I added a few more extra tracks than I usually do, as mentioned I wanted this one to be a little more special being the ’10th anniversary’ of the NES Medley and all, so I threw in 5 tracks that were either iconic NES VGM songs or games that had yet to be represented in an NES Medley. These five were: the Kid Icarus Title Theme (not a single KI song in any NES Medleys till now), the SMB2 Character Select Theme (just a killer song that deserved some medley representation) the Boss Theme from Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II (StarTropics is an important piece of GaMetal history, being represented in the first GaMetal NES Medley. That’s why it had an acoustic track on the GaMetal album!), Detected! from Metal Gear (a personal favorite of mine that I’ve always wanted to put into an NES Medley but never got around to till now), and Zone J from Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers (a real VGM classic).

I’m a fan of all of the NES Medley song line-ups, but this one worked out spectacularly! I’m especially fond of the Amazon/Building Theme section. That might be one of my favorite sections in any NES Medley’s yet.

On a final note regarding NES Medley history… eventually it was suggested by a Patron (I can’t recall who exactly but feel free to refresh my memory!) to start calling these NEStalgia, which I thought was really cool, and has been the naming convention for these medleys and some others (SNEStalgia, Genestalgia) ever since.

My apologies to the folks that made the NEStalgia game. I hope you don’t mind! 😅