Greetings and salutations Hivers. Today let's go into another Evening Groove / Three Tune Tuesday post.

As always, thanks to @ablaze for making this series. Lots of people participate in it! Follow the tags to find a ton of good music recommendation.

Today when I opened YouTube to find some music for this post, boom, right there in my recommendations was a great Tetris theme. I'll include it as the first song here. That put me in mind for more video game music, so that became today's theme.

WDR Funkhausorchester - Korobeiniki (Tetris Theme)

I didn't realize it until I looked it up for this post, but it's actually a fairly old song. It is a traditional nineteenth-century folksong. It was based on a poem. The first printed music we have is dated to 1861, and the first recording was in 1905 on gramophone.

But of course the arrangement we are all most familiar with was arranged in 1989 by Hirokazu Tanaka for Nintendo's Game Boy version of Tetris. Evidently Korobeiniki had already appeared as the Tetris song on the Apple ][ and Mac versions of Tetris, so Tanaka can't be credited with the song choice for the game, just with the infectious arrangement.

Anyway, here is a great performance of it!

By the way, it is a German orchestra. Deepl tells me that "WDR Funkhausorchester" translates to WDR Radio House Orchestra. ChatGPT then tells me that WDR means Westdeutscher Rundfunk, which is a German public-broadcasting institution based in North Rhine-Westphalia. So there we go.

The Danish National Symphony Orchestra - Final Fantasy VII: One Winged Angel

FFVII is an extremely popular game in the series. It was super-popular back in 1997 when it was first released, winning over many new fans to the RPG genre, and it is again really popular now with a whole new generation of fans with the recent remake. One Winged Angel is an amazing song that anyone who has played the game loves.

This version slows down the tempo, which works really well. And of course the Danish National Symphony Orchestra is one of the best in the world—their performance of the piece is flawless.

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra - Megaman

This arrangement includes songs from the first three Megaman games. If you grew up with these games like I did, this entire performance will have you smiling. The Megaman songs are far from works of art; they are usually 1-1.5 minutes long, a single theme, and repeated for the entire stage. They are usually catchy themes. Whoever did this arrangement really artfully mixed them together into something that transcends the source material.

So what's your favorite?

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.