How This SNES Game Harnessed Utter Musical CHAOS
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
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We're SO fortunate to have this work from Geoff Follin to look back on and enjoy for years to come. I can't think of a better way to remember him and his incredible work than to geek out over the pure musical insanity that is PLOK! Thank you, Geoff.
Are you going to make a new Studio Ghibli music theory video? I left a comment on about this on another video and you replied saying its a "pretty awesome idea". Just wondering what the status of that is.😃😃
can you take a look at Olivier Deriviere's track for Remember Me that is called Nilin the Memory Hunter?, the track is rather beautiful for being a modern video game piece
Can you react to duke ellington nutcracker, and cannonball adderleys fiddler on the roof? Please!
How did you find out about this game?!? My dad got it for me on sale when he was in Germany ( snes games where extremely expensive for us Poles at the time ). I absolutely love this game and this insane soundtrack.
Have you listened to the soundtrack for Soul Eater? Super unique and interesting instrument choices and placements!
FUN FACT: Besides the title music, basically every other song in the soundtrack only uses 5 of the 8 SNES sound channels in order to make room for sound effects to never interrupt the music.
They were literally only using like 62.5% of their power, man.!.!
The Follin Brothers’ black magic at work
The 9th chords in the beach theme are just 2 major chord samples layered on top of each other.
@@Peepimus There was a similar design philosophy used in doom 2016, where they made sure the dominant frequencies of the music and most of the sound effects didn't overlap which would cause player confusion. Here it's to make sure there's no awkward sound drops
Follins need only 1 channel to create a masterpiece.
Geoff Follin has passed away this year due to pancreatic cancer... RIP and thanks for the tracks... Regards to his brothers Tim and Mike Follin.
The surviving Follin Brothers are participating in the Great Step Forward, a fundraising walk supported by Pancreatic Cancer UK in 2025, whilst Dean Belfield, a former Software Creations coder, is taking part in the Manchester 10K, both to raise funds for the charity and to honour Geoff's memory.
WHAAAAAAT NOOOO
Wasn't Tim the one that made this music though?
@@thewinterprince1731both Tim and Geoff made music
I f***ing hate that stupid disease
Babe wake up, he dropped the PLOK video
FINALLY I’ve only been begging for this in the comments for years
one of my most favourite games of all times :)
Yes! Yes! Yes!
It’s finally here!
Honey, I'm up! You get the snacks, I'll put on the coffee and nab the laptop, we meet back on the bed in 10!
Been waiting for this!
Plok was created by John and Ste Pickford who were games designers in Manchester UK. I drew, produced and animated the promo for Plok old style (2D animation) so that the brothers could take it to States. The games animation had not been created at that time. The promo worked and Plok was commissioned. I didn't hear most of that awesome music until after work on the game had begun. A few months ago I went back to Scotland to visit family and got talking to my two nerdy nephews. While we were discussing my old career, one of them was consulting his phone. Suddenly, he shouted "F*CK! You worked on PLOK???" I didn't know it had become such a cult, it's gained a new life, and this great music is part of that.
Was this a purely internal thing to share to pitch meetings? I can't seem to find any animated advertisements at all, I'm genuinely curious to see what that was like
That is awesome
@@goodguy8457 It was purely to sell the project at a Comicon-type gathering in the States. I believe it ran on a loop for guests/attendees at the convention.
Only the Follin bros. could amaze people w/ their music skills by the likes of Miyamoto. Even Sakurai recently acknowledged Follin’s music in a video.
in what video???
@@VOXD56.MP3 In his recent video titled "Famicom and NES music"
@@sinitheexcellent3654 Thanks!!
This channel is slowly becoming a Follin bros appreciation channel and I'm here for it.
Tim Follin and Nobuo Uematsu are my faves
One of the best video game music playlists i could find on youtube is called "Tim Follin is a god"
Tim Follin is basically that one unemployed friend in Friday who makes random masterpieces out of nowhere
@MaoRatto
0 seconds ago
On* Friday not in Friday. When was last time you can physically go inside of "Friday"?
@@MaoRattoThere's a movie named Friday. I don't know if that's what this was though.
We need a follow up. We’ve barely scratched the surface of this masterpiece.
Senn's remasterings of these songs tend to have a lot of interesting info shown alongside the songs
I truly need to see his reaction to Spot for the gameboy. Geoff saw that poor reversi clone and was generous enough to grant it that miracle called the game's idle music.
I'm a simple man: I see someone talk about the Plok! soundtrack, I click. I still hold Plok! as the pinnacle of SNES audio engineering and composition. Whenever someone asks me for SNES music recommendations, this is one of my go-tos.
Many of the recordings of the soundtrack on UA-cam have a "crunchy", bitcrushed sound to them (which you can hear, for example, at 5:56). I heard this was because it was difficult to record the music at the time the recordings were made. When played on an SNES, the aliasing is smoothed out by the console's audio filter. There are licensed soundtrack releases on vinyl and cassette tape that sound more like the an actual SNES's output.
Yeah i got disappointed that he listened to the lower quality uploads on UA-cam but I'm still so hyped he made this video at all
@@roilo8560 He needs to learn how to use Zophar's domain
Never knew what Plok! is but I'm so damn into it right now. The curiosity dragged me into chaos and I'm enjoying this at the fullest
That's really cool, and now I realize why what I've been hearing recently online doesn't match up with what I remember from playing
Why don't people just record the audio from the system?
As a jazz drummer that never learned how to read music/music theory, I have no idea what you're saying half the time but I have a profane love of weirdo time signatures and for whatever reason old games love doing crazy stuff with the rhythm. But I also love how excited you get when a soundtrack does something you don't expect. A true love of music is really fun to watch.
I'd reckon the 8-bit sounds limitation would likely play a big part in retro-games' obsessions with weirdo composition, since they can't go crazy with instrumentalisation they have to go crazy with harmonies and rythm for the songs to be distinct and memorables
Want to add another level to the insanity? Listen to the interview that he did on the Super Marcato Bros podcast, episode 321. They ask him about his composition process, and he says that it wasn't composed first and then transcribed into the game system. He was pretty much just entering frequency and duration values directly into the code, making it up as he went and keeping it all in his head. Now *that's* brilliance!
the code itself was his sheet music
0:43/3:06 - Title
5:39 - Beach
10:29 - Akrillic
11:40 - Boss
13:05 - Rocket Launcher
16:37 - Conclusion
Thank you!
Well hello Roller Mobster
the boss theme of this game is good and all, but the beach theme doesnt get enough love, it really goes really hard
The Beach theme gets the most attention. The true beauty is Creepy Crag. Unfortunately, he did not cover that one in this video, but it's my favorite song
Love Beach - when the Trumpets kick in, you could swear you were listening to a Stevie Wonder track (it does have some similarity to do I do). On a SNES chip - The Follins were just wizards with hardware of this time
creepy crag is underrated
Are you kidding me? Everyone knows the beach theme 😭
They're all great, but Venge Thicket has always been my favourite.
I hear the title screen blues and immediate thought, "Wait, WHAT? That's CD QUALITY! HOW is that on a SNES??!?!?"
This soundtrack absolutely takes influence from 70's era Genesis! The 7/8 piece at 8:58 sounds so much like the solo in the second half of The Cinema Show for example. And especially those chords over a single pedal tone at 15:48 are typical for Genesis progressions. Thank you for showing us this incredible OST!
Lots of Yes influences in Follin compositions too.
We should be clear: this is the British prog rock band named Genesis, not the SEGA Genesis video game console (which Tim also wrote for). Not many contexts where those would get mixed up but this is one of them!
10:58 it's crazy how much this sounds like a genesis thing
I was looking for this comment! Yes!
It's weird thinking of Genesis as 70s prog rock, knowing them mostly from "The Way We Walk".
I love that you've dived so deep into video game music.
It's a highly underrated artform.
the number one rule of video game music is...give it to the Follin boys and itll be an instant hit.
Unfortunately the games were never hits, though.
*HE DID IT! CHARLES FINALLY TALKED ABOUT ONE OF THE MOST 🔥 SNES OST OUT THERE! LET'S GOOOOOOOOOOO!!*
But fr tho, I'm glad you're finally talking about this amazing game's OST, definitely one of my favorite works from the Follin Brothers. ❤
Also, may Geoff Follin rest in peace. 🙏
Do u allways listen to music so emotionally??.... like imagine a guy sittin next to u in train and GO LIKE " oohohohooHOO" *extreme nodding*
you mean to say you don’t?
I mean if I hear a nasty melody that shakes my core I will def do that
It's a byproduct of learning how to hear
The video would be awkward if he wasn’t so expressive about it imo…
Tim and Geoff Follin turned every soundtrack they touched into gold.
RIP Geoff you absolute legend
I see Plok musical analysis, I click. Simple as.
RIP Geoff Follin. Never heard of him (or this game) until now, but he did incredible work.
My father grew up in the 70s, imparted his love for THE PROG (ie genesis crimson ELP). As a classical pianist (and growing up SNESboy) all I hear is genesis amidst this chaos!! Dancing w Moonlit knight, the Knife, even later sans Peter stuff like wind and wuthering.
Keep up the lovely stuff man, really tickles my nostalgia and musical bone every am!!
Even when I dont know the rules of making music, I just love how much Charles enjoys every little thing
5:43 The sounds my music bro makes when I show him this cool new lofi prog jazz bop I found
Man Tim and Geoff were decades ahead of their time. Glad you got around to covering the Plok OST, I think it’s arguably one of the best game soundtracks of all time
One of the tricks here is to use a sample of a single note at different pitches to create a chord, then mix that chord down to its own sample. It was done because these systems (particularly the Amiga) could only play a few samples simultaneously, so it was more efficient to mix down to a chord sample. It's easier to do it that way in the music tracker software they would have been using as well. Particularly at 14:45, those major chords would be one sample played at different pitches.
This is why Charles is really having trouble wrapping his head around this - this was a *common* trick in Amiga music. To be fair, Tim & Geoff are doing it *exceptionally* well here, because their major/minor samples are 7th/9th chords, not just 1/3/5.
And later software like Octamed multiplied the voices available for the Amiga. See Ahoy's remarkable work "Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit" on UA-cam.
@@BixenteFabregas Correct. The point to note here is that only Plok's Title Theme uses all 8 channels that the SNES sound chip allows for. The "Gift" song uses 6. Everything else uses 5. You *have* to do these sorts of sample-crunching tricks.
@@Benanov Or have with the game cartridge a sound enhancer chip. There were many. FDS audio, Namco 163 audio, MMC5 audio, Sunsoft 5B audio, INES Mapper 018, INES Mapper 072, INES Mapper 086, INES Mapper 092, Mitsubishi M50805, VRC6 and the most rare, VRC7 used only once in Lagrange's Point. Some enhance audio capacity, others even add new audio channels...
@@BixenteFabregas You're referencing NES/FDS mapper chips which are unavailable on the SNES/SFC. I do not believe the SNES/SFC exposed the audio path to the cartridge as the NES did.
I'm sure other people have posted this, but pretty much every time I see someone say the thing about Miyamoto thinking the console was modified, someone else shows up and says that's a myth. He was certainly impressed, but having been involved in the design of the console, I'm sure he knew the sound chip was _sample-based_ and not "just an 8-bit system" as Charles put it. The reason most SNES music sounds samey is that most composers didn't really know what they were doing with the chip, and passed around the same set of basic samples; the true potential of the chip was limited only by the quality of the samples you could cram onto the cartridge alongside your game.
We need a Plok series where you deep dive on every tune. Such a masterpiece.
I never got an SNES as a kid, but that didn't stop me from reading every issue of Nintendo Power at my local library and I LOVED reading about Plok. It was always on my list of games to play and I had no idea the music was so incredible.
I said this on the Tim Follin video, but I’m so glad more and more people are acknowledging Geoff and Tim these days.
The Follins brothers heard what the sound chips of the time were like, were super unsatisfied and then said "fine, I'll do it myself".
There’s a really awesome full jazz band cover of Beach here on UA-cam called ‘Line in the Sand’ which is absolutely worth hearing.
ua-cam.com/video/W1_UAu-n-f4/v-deo.htmlsi=wuQ6JSmtEsj_-HBY
Thanks for the recommendation!
Not a single person in my County had this game. They all thought I was lying it existed, pretended I made it up, or just straight up thought I was playing the music off a cd or laser disc. It was unbelievable. The incredible soundtrack and unique gameplay was something out of this world. I am still so humbled to this day that I own and can play this on an original system, with a tv that provides the perfect sound for it (my parents kept a lot of stuff). Glad to see the world enjoying everything about Plok and other hidden gems in this day and age. Game preservation is a growing demand and I am here😊 for it.
WE ARE PLOKONTINUING THE FOLLIN SERIES
A Made in Abyss Soundtrack video and this year is over. VOH still sends shivers down my spine.
that would be incredible
13:05 - "Rocket Launcher" sounds like someone took the level 1 theme from Rocket Knight Adventures and told Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to do their own prog rock take on it. It's just wild!
I looked up "Charles Cornell Plok" LAST NIGHT and was disappointed when I got nothing, I was surprised because you hadn't covered it in your other video about Tim Follin, and now see that you uploaded this 2 HOURS AGO. Feel like I literally willed this into existence lmao
Well thank you
The Follin Bros. continues to be absolutely iconic and absolutely carry the games they worked on
OH MY GOODNESS THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR UPLOADING AN ANALYZATION ON PLOK!'S SOUNDTRACK AAAAA I WAS FREAKING OUT WHEN I SAW THIS-
0:40 Bach will remember this
10:17 Not gonna lie that was preatty smooth
Works of follins are incredibly intuitive, deeply sophisticated, powerful and inventive. Each time I end up being mindblown after encountering one of the tracks. Liked yours vids about them. And the versatile manner of a way they work with harmony gave me such an impact as Promised Neverland did. So I remembered about one of my fav jazz guitarists Paul Metheny and found his soundtrack works with his group. After discovering the soundtrack to a forgotten film The Falcon and the Snowman I was completely blown away by a painful beauty, soulful nature and moving spirit of the 4th track The Falcon. Metheny and the keybordist Lyle Mays did such a tasteful, subtle, lucid and distinctive work with arrangement and majestic voice of the group's vocalist Pedro Aznar just entirely let you burst into tears. Highly recommend you this unexpectedly breathtaking OST for a new analysis, and their works as well.
we're getting closer to him discovering splatoon 😩
That would be nice!
Here we'll go totally atonal and nuts
Good music in that game
god if he listens to w-3's music, hes gonna lose his mind
The 31/16 time signature 😩 🐟🐟🐟
Been playing and collecting games for more than four decades and I have never heard the music for this game. I feel ashamed. Thanks for covering this.
His mind is blown every pitch change lol
This soundtrack is almost CD quality on a SNES. A friend of mine tought this music was from a PS1 or N64 game. It is insane how good the SNES soundchip is.
Thanks for looking at the Beach theme. It is one of the best tracks of Tim/Geoff. The sevenths/ninths sea is amazing, absolute genius. And of course the rest rest too. I played it during the SNES period, directly recognizing the soundtrack. If I think of the uniqueness of their compositions, it still brings me to tears.
10:17 That run made me instantly think about Back to the Future.
Holy cow…I hear it too.
Made me think of Zelda: ALTTP title screen 😁
@@EdBoi18 yes that too!
nice hidden gem. Would love to see you break down ActRaiser for SNES
4:46 but the track is not in B major, but rather B (minor) blues. D is in B minor and B blues.
that diminished scale with major chords is very Italo-house sounding
14:15 someone please take this out of context somehow
lets goooooooo more of the Follin brothers . they are legends , :( rip Geoff
Nothing will ever hit as much as the Boss theme, what a soundtrack!
A lot of this reminds me of some of the Kansas instrumental tracks, like Pinacle. They also sound like a lot of the tracks in Final Fantasy 5, were we know Uematsu listed Kansas as an inspiration. The earth temple and battle on the big bridge.
LET'S GOOO I HAD MEMORIES OF CHARLES TRYING TO TRANSCRIBE AN OUT OF TUNE GAME OST
9:22 That part goes totally House music. XD
IIRC Tim Follin was inspired by Stevie Wonder to do a key change like that
@@Benanov Good inspiration!
the intro is definitely more of a rockabilly vibe.
Poll’s Akrillik and Beach themes are some of my personal favorites.
How did I miss this gem of a game growing up? That music is just insane, no wonder it's heralded as one of the best on the SNES. Seriously amazing compositions. Geoff Follin was just incredible and this is a cool way to honor him.
Also, the game was going to see a release on the Genny but said port was canceled. Wonder if a beta exists of that, would love to hear how the soundtrack would've sounded on the Genny.
Tim and Geoff Follin are freaking geniuses!
The sample quality is insane
THANK YOUUUU FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO I LOVEEEEE THE PLOK! SOUNDTRACK SO MUCHHHH
he forgot the sick solo in the beach theme
thats like the best part
While you‘re in the Follin Hole, look at Time Trax (Genesis) or the Gauntlet 3 (C64) Title Theme (Make Sure it‘s the C64 version, there are some others i think with a different Soundtrack)😊 If you want to Switch it up, Look at Earth Bound (SNES, not Tim Follin tho)
Tim Follin did the soundtracks for all 3 platforms (C64, Amiga, and ZX Spectrum), and they're a bit different. I believe the soundtrack Speccy version is mostly a downgraded C64 version, but the Amiga version is really good too.
Wow. A video of yours on Plok has been on my wishlist for a while. Feels great
Akryllic is very Emerson Lake & Palmer. Especially the drums. They're 100% Carl Palmer style drums
Check out the Ecco the Dolphin OST on the Saturn. It's Follin on modern synths in full glory.
The SEGA (Mega) CD ones or Defender of the Future (DC/PS2)?
Rereading I see you mean DotF. Passage to Genesis is a wonderful track and my personal favorite Follin track.
@@daniellaster9154 Oh yes, I did mean Defender of the Future (althought eh Mega CD Ecco is good too).
The power of unpredictability, musical and technical genius
You want excellence in obscurity?
Cover Konami's "Morning Music."
Played only when a certain arcade machine is BOOTING UP.
The Morning Music is most associated with Gradius
OMG yes finally a PLOK video. This was my first game as a kid and honestly probably influenced a lot of my music taste to this day.
Never thought charles would make a video on PLOK 😂
8:21 this ten seconds of brilliant editing and dialogue should absolutely have everyone using this site subscribed
Thank you for this video! I actually get so much of Maurice Ravel from these chord progressions. The Follin brothers' music is simply amazing!
Plok! Yes! I played this game as a kid and I'm having the soundtrack in my gaming playlist for several years now (obviously because it's awesome). The game is rather underrated imo and the soundtrack really deserves the attention!
Some humble suggestions for other videos would be:
"Still More Fighting" from FF VII
"Alaska" from Marvel Super Heroes in War of the Gems
"Beware the Forest's Mushrooms" from Super Mario RPG
"Laughin Jokin Numbnuts" from Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures
plok in lithuanian means clap :P
OMG I'm so glad you did Plok I LOVE this soundtrack. You always pick excellent classic games Charles!
He actually did it.!.!
Dude no matter what song you show me, i love it sooooo much
Contra was one of my favorite games growing up. The soundtrack is wonderful! :) I'd love to hear you discuss that one!
Yeah do Contra 3!
After studying over the few talks youve had on the backdoor 2-5, i managed to figure out the absolutely harmonically bending ways you can traverse the 12 tempered keys messing with minor thirds and all things diminshed. After decades of studying and breaking thru my old classical training i can finally 'throw colors' onto a canvas with my improv. I was really appreciating what you were highlighting by isolating the dimished scale out of one of the earlier chords. Thanks prof! 💜
I am so glad you finally covered Plok! I love it when you cover songs by the Follin brothers as much as the next guy, but I’d like to see you cover some songs made by Jeroen Tel. He mainly composed for Commodore 64, which only has 3 channels as opposed to the NES’s 4. If you love Tim and Geoff Follin’s work, then you’re gonna love Jeroen Tel’s music, because his compositions are just as amazing and mind-blowing!
Another recommendation I have is to listen to the Tetris CDI soundtrack. It has that pure late 80’s/ early 90’s sound that has no right being in a Tetris game!
I've been looking for a long time for that tip on moving in minor thirds--so happy I watched this one! That sound is one of those common "jazzy" ones I hear but didn't know how to reproduce. Thanks Charles!
Cannot wait for more Follin content. You should also do Silver Surfer and Concentration on NES.
Needless to say, Geoff truly cooked.
And Equinox
I remember this being one of those weird games that I ended up loving. I hadn’t thought about this one for so long and this video just rushed in the nostalgia. Thank you so much for reminding me of this hidden gem.
Hey Charles, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Phantom Dust soundtrack
I'll add some track suggestions below:
Title Theme
All This World
Spiral Highway (embodies the feel of the game most of the time)
Strange Apparitions
October 10th,1986
Face To Face (Splitscreen then Xbox Live)
Then there are some familiar songs:
Memories
Plastic People
Club Baroness, Goodbye
Mac's Shop
Arsenal
Finally, an unused final boss theme: Untitled
It's such a good game that almost never existed
Amazing video, always interesting to learn all the different techniques to create such cool music! Thanks for putting the chord names etc up, was super easy to follow! 😁
What about Yasunori Mitsuda? Chrono Cross is still one of my favourite video game sound tracks ever.
I have no musical talent whatsoever but I love your videos. It’s fun watching you break things down, even if you are speaking a language I don’t understand.
yessss been secretly waiting for you to cover plok 🙂↕️
I'm probably three weeks late, but something you might find interesting about the way this game stores and plays its samples - it's actually using pre-baked chord samples all the time, rather than playing them all in separate channels at a time. It's pretty astounding work, given how rigid the SPC's sample looping system is.
I hear Gustav Holst's planets and Star Wars in those chord structures..
I think there's more of a Billie Jean vibe to it ... unless it's Baby Shark rather ?
So happy to see this game get some love. There is so little about it out there and many people I talk to forgot in even existed.
11:36 I'm gonna be that person: the SNES is 16-bit, not 8-bit!
True, but the sound chip was 8 bit.
The SNES CPU is 16-bit, but Sony's DSP is an 8-bit chip.
yea the audio is 8 bit… this tripped me up too!
16 bit graphics but an 8 bit sound chip
The nes had 8 bit graphics with a 4 bit sound chip
it has 8 bit audio lol. he literally says this
cant imagine having the audacity to be "that person" and still be wrong
This soundtrack had NO RIGHT to go this hard. And this was my introduction to Tim and Geoff
Just popping in to recommend that you check out the soundtrack for Katawa Shoujo - a beloved classic visual novel game with a great soundtrack. It is absolutely beautiful as a story and is getting an official release on Steam in just a few days, giving it a HUGE uptick in attention, so now is a perfect time to check it out. I'd love to see you experience the amazing songs from it! Wiosna is the main menu theme and is raw nostalgia in song form, while Red Velvet is classy and jazzy, and Parity is a much more unique jam. Would love love love to see you check it out as the Steam release is happening.
(on a much less related nor topical note, you should check out the amazingly unique soundtrack of the anime Sonny Boy, notably Yamabiko's theme which is unlike almost anything else I've heard, though the whole (relatively small) soundtrack is super diverse and unique in general, basically every song. The show straight up has no music playing most of the time, so it uses its music *very* well.)
Still wishing for you to tackle the KATAMARI DAMACY OST, specially the intro and Lonely Rolling Star. The King of all Cosmos is waiting for you.
Here in Brazil we had a kids show called Castelo Ra-Tim-Bum (ra-tim-bum castle).
I'd love to see you reacting to their opening. You're amazing, bro!
The bass is fantastic too.. walking lines, synth drops.. killer