And I knew nothing!” McBride tells Digital Trends. “All of a sudden, I had this reputation of being a designer of entertainment attractions. He’d write for the era’s most popular horror magazines, design sound for a haunted house ride in one of the world’s first indoor amusement parks, work with Vincent Price on a series of commercials for the project, and help Blockbuster break into the video game industry with a project called Blockbuster Adventure that never saw the light of day.
His pursuit of a new creative outlet took him on an eclectic career adventure.
While they were usually more of a supporting act for bands like The Beach Boys and the Yardbirds, New Colony Six found modest success with two Top 20 records and were credited at the time for creating the “garage band sound” (“It was just because we weren’t that good,” McBride jokes.) But as the band’s sound changed over time and moved into ballad territory, McBride began to lose interest and would eventually part ways with the group. The first key player is Pat McBride, then a young musician in Chicago who was a member of the 1960s band New Colony Six. The heart of the tale is much easier to follow: It was the product of two bored musicians looking for new challenges in their careers at the same time. The full story of how Donkey Kong Goes Home came to be is a surprisingly complicated chain of events that includes a 1980s hit single, a failed Blockbuster video game initiative, and Vincent Price. And it was underneath decades of dust that I’d come face to face with the original Mario.
Through a series of interviews with the musicians behind Donkey Kong Goes Home, I’d unearth the lost history behind a pioneering piece of Mario media. And I was curious enough about its puzzling creation to do exactly that. The only way you’d be able to learn anything more about the decades-old project would be by tracking down the guys behind the disembodied voices that gave life to these characters for the first time. You can only hear it through a few YouTube uploads that have racked up less than 10,000 views apiece. Donkey Kong Goes Home exists in a state of fossilization today, with nearly no digital footprint in the internet age or preservation efforts from Nintendo. It’s a critical piece of Mario history, but you wouldn’t know that from reading Nintendo’s own lore, fan forums, or even Wikipedia.
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