ReMix:Super Mario Bros. "Life Is Peachy" 3:29

ZackParrish wasn't just the mastering engineer for our new Impact of Iwata album, he was also an arranger! You could argue he got quite the plum assignment, because his Satoru Iwata tribute touches on arguably the most impactful game in ALLLLLL of gaming, Super Mario Bros.! It turns out Iwata's programming advice was instrumental in guiding Super Mario Bros.' swimming physics, so yet again we owe the former Nintendo president -- factoids like this and MUCH MORE in Lucas M. Thomas's Impact of Iwata book, which is a must-buy! Serendipity played a part in the mellow mood according to Parrish, as a loss of electricity initially meant Zack messing around with acoustic tools:

"I signed up to do a track for the Iwata audiobook, and jumped on this particular theme pretty quickly. I had vastly different plans originally when I chose it, but the universe had another idea when one afternoon a thunderstorm rocked our neighborhood and placed a tree on a power line. Without power for the next 4 hours, we had zilch to do, so, while the kids acted like loonies out and about, I grabbed my acoustic and started messing around with the underwater theme on it. A couple of hours later, I had written a purely acoustic take on the theme.

Over the next few months, I occasionally dabbled on it, but nothing was really clicking after that first foray, and other things like participating in GSM, original VGM stuff, etc.... I kind of lost track of what I was doing with it to begin with. Well, GSM ended and I went back to it and added quite a bit to the original acoustic-only version.

Near the end, I had sent it to Xaleph and Emunator because I felt like it was missing something... and Em insisted on resampling/editing the bass parts... so I entertained it just to see what he had in mind. He also suggested adding an alto sax part (I think)... so I dusted mine off and am making my debut playing sax on a track. That's about it, really. A very chill theme and quite different from most of what I normally do."

Much like how chiptunes' technical limitations bred VGM compositional creativity in the 80s and 90s, Parrish's power outage sent him down a silk road of smooveness that led to more introspective arranging by way of the acoustic-minded approach. The underwater theme's a childhood favorite of mine, so I'm always game for a laid-back spin on it; Zack delivers a sophisticated flow with innocent-sounding bubbliness, clutch string padding, subtle-yet-bountiful bass, and sultry saxophone (a seed planted by that ne'er-do-well, Emu).

Dare I say, things have been going pretty darn good for the Zack Attack lately; the Impact of Iwata album and particularly the audiobook presented cool professional-level challenges that stretched his skills, and both he and his wonderful wifey have recently leveled up their careers, so perhaps this piece ultimately represents this recent positive arc where, yeah... life is peachy. :-) A well-deserved tip of the cap to the Parrishes, and well-wishes for even peachier days ahead!