Composer: Jun Chikuma
“Sounds like an airport.”
“Office/kid room aesthetic synth”
“Elevator music”
“This is going in my PowerPoint.”
It’s mind-boggling to think that a track with comments like this across its various YouTube uploaded versions is receiving all of these comparisons as a compliment. Not just that, but that these sit alongside countless bits of praise referring to “Redial” as one of the greatest pieces of gaming music they’ve ever encountered.
The title, “Redial,” is enough to understand that this feeling isn’t an accident. It’s trying to elicit the vibes of hold music or waiting room muzak. The lo-fi timbre of the synthesizers that cycles through the two main themes, first with a breezy, woodwind-like vibe on the first, then to the softly-plucked chords and later the theremin-like whistle that plays the second theme. It’s a track with a sneaky pair of earworm melodies, almost like they care first about not annoying you when they repeat, but end up sticking to the inside of your head the rest of the day until you start humming them to yourself hours later. Sometimes you might not even be sure where a tune like it came from and you’d be lucky if you even get the chance to learn what it’s called. Thankfully, in this case, it’s not some throwaway track we tried not to pay attention to while waiting for an insurance agent, it’s part of the whole experience that is Bomberman Hero – and also like 100 retro gaming YouTube videos.
Of course, the melodies are only part of what makes “Redial” such a killer track – if it were just the sheet music, we might not get so latched onto it. The genius of it actually comes from the marriage to that heart-racing jungle sound that so many game composers of the late ‘90s took inspiration from. No background or hold music I know starts off with the Amen Break and refuses to let up on that backing tempo, other than what sounds like a change between an open and closed hi-hat in different sections. Gaming really tapped into the drum ‘n’ bass sound in this era as audio quality both on carts and CD formats improved, and the sense of speed in genres like that thrived on it like racing and sports, but fighting games like Street Fighter, puzzle games like Tetrisphere, and even the intro to Super Mario 64 like a little taste of that quick-shuffling, high-bpm feel.
Unlike a lot of tracks I’ve looked at in this series, there aren’t a lot of covers or reinterpretations of “Redial” to look at or explore. But there are a hell of a lot of playlists featuring this track right up at the top that also highlight the jungle style of this era. The variety of titles and different pieces in general should be a really good indication of how well “Redial” represents this movement across all platforms of the late ‘90s.
