Best of ND 2014! Track of the Week: Deep Freeze (Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix)

This story was selected as one of our best from 2014. It was originally published on September 14, during Issue 22: The Beat Goes On.

The Nintendo GameCube really churned out the Mario spin-offs, with its library including four Mario Party games, four Mario Sports titles, a Mario RPG, Kart-racer, and more. Perhaps this era’s most overlooked spin-off is Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix, created by a partnership between Nintendo and Konami the likes of which we’ll probably never see again. The prolific arcade rhythm game finally came to a Nintendo console, complete with a Mario branded dance mat and a new catalog of remixed Mario music.

At its core, the DDR series consists of games that are goofy fun for a time– but they become tiresome and inevitably get forgotten as the next cycle comes along. Mario Mix is special, as its uniqueness and charm separate it from all the other games with the exact same mechanics. It even added a single player quest, in which you watch Mario awkwardly dance alongside other characters for very loosely defined reasons. Bowser stole some special musical keys to learn how to dance. But hey, Waluigi became the boss of his own world! (He dances to music from Wrecking Crew by some convoluted logic– there are living eggplant enemies in that game, and Waluigi supposedly likes eggplants. If you comb the pieces of the Mario mythos together you will find Waluigi being vaguely related to Wrecking Crew in more than one instance.)

Of course, the music is where DDR: Mario Mix shines the brightest. Rather than remixed pop songs or generic EDM, the game was full of dancified Mario tunes! They ran the spectrum of games, from the original Mario Bros. up to GameCube games that were a year old at the time of Mario Mix‘s release in 2005. So without further ado, here is the track of the week: “Deep Freeze,” an arrangement of the “Fever” theme from Dr. Mario.

The soundtrack of this game is filled to the brim with groovy Mario melodies. They are short, sweet, and stand out as a representation of a particularly interesting time of Nintendo history. Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix is worth a revisit just for the music alone, if you have too much pride to break out the dance mat again after all these years.