"Jungle Battle (Main BGM) from Contra on the Nintendo Family Computer and the Nintendo Entertainment System (1988)
Composer: Kazuki Muraoka
Arranged By: Hidenori Maezawa, Kyouhei Sada
Label: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Nine and a half years into writing MIDI Week Singles, this is the first time we've covered this song and any song from the Contra series. Likely because this song (and the Contra series) comes with so much baggage and legacy, we're only covering it now. Just Google or search on YouTube for "Contra Jungle Theme" and you'll come back with umpteen thousand hits, so what is it that we could possibly add to this 34-year-old discourse? Not much really.
But I want to mention why we're crediting the arrangers here when we normally only list the composer. Because of the work done from the original music composed on and for the 1987 arcade release to the 1988 release on the Famicom with an entirely different sound chip and playing environment, I find that I like this version over the original arcade since I can not only hear the music over the tinniness of the background sound effects but there is also additional weight to the music and instrumentation. It could very well be nostalgia-related and because this is the version that I am most familiar with, but I genuinely believe (biasedly) that there is a quality to this song that is rarely matched in background music for side-scrolling platform shooters from the late 1980s.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplanman/Jaconian
P.S. I know that in some instances there are differences between the Famicom and NES versions of music, such as with the Castlevania series, but I couldn't find any known differences between the music from the Famicom and NES versions of Contra. Just wanted to throw that out there.
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