Third Song Sample: Turtles in Time (1992)

This next audio sample is from Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV - Turtles In Time, a title for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1992. This piece was created by Mutsuhiko Izumi and Kozo Nakamura. (4)

This excerpt is the first one on the timeline to be featured on a home console, and in terms of sound capability the SNES is clearly pulling no punches, boasting a massive eight dedicated channels for composers to take advantage of -- all of which are used in this song. The SNES also had a state-of-the-art feature which allowed composers to begin sampling different instruments and implementing them into compositions. In this song, the sampling can be found in the drums and percussion, which would normally be just a simple noise wave.

From the audio alone, multiple continuous layers of sound can be heard on top of one another. This is most certainly leagues beyond DigDug and perhaps even Tetris, despite it only being three years after the previous entry.

Despite all this, "Sewer Surfing" still has its drawbacks on a technical level. We are still very much in the territory of computer generated noises and sounds being produced from sound chips, rather than any studio recorded tracks.