Thirty-five years is a long time to carry a sound. When Nintendo and Leo Chicago came to us to help score the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, they needed music that could convey that history. The 1991 Super Nintendo campaign they wanted to reference had its own anthem, its own energy, and its own Paul Rudd. Any new score would have to engage with all of that head on.
The original spot was built around “Now You’re Playing With Power”: a bold, unmistakably early-90s video game song. The Switch 2 updates that legacy. “Now You’re Playing Together” brings a new tagline and a new emotional world, one built around connection and shared play rather than individual conquest.
The Brief: From 1991 to Now
In an advertising music landscape that often defaults to a well-placed licensed song, this project was unique. The brief required music that could open in 1991 and land in the present, scoring Paul Rudd’s comedy callbacks, the chaos of multiplayer Mario Kart World, and a genuinely cinematic finale, all within a minute and a half.
The vision that emerged included multiple distinct compositions woven into a single journey. Marmoset Music Production Associate Graham Barton was tasked with composing a score that could be all of these things at once, and make it feel effortless.
“The music needed to feel like one cohesive experience despite being made up of several distinct vignettes,” Barton said. “Each with its own personality and genre had to stitch together seamlessly across a minute-and-a-half spot.” A score with that kind of range, could cover more emotional ground than any needle drop ever could, and would say something true about what Nintendo has always been.
Creative Execution: Memory as a Launchpad
Barton structured his workflow around what he called “mini-films” — isolating each vignette and going deep before zooming out. Leo Chicago provided specific timestamps for each beat: ominous intro, playful banter, dynamic gameplay, grandiose outro. Working in focused chunks meant each section could be made authentic to its own world while still serving the full arc.
The starting point was the actual 1991 source recordings, supplied directly by the agency. Rather than approximate that sound, Barton deconstructed it — pulling apart the session slating, isolating the drums, separating the general MIDI textures that announce the early ’90s so clearly. From those raw materials, he rebuilt the orchestration from the ground up to fit the pacing of the new campaign. “I didn’t have to butcher the sound by ripping it off,” he said. “Instead, I could preserve the character, move pieces around, and elevate the production value from there.”
The original score became a launchpad. The moment the spot transitions out of its 1991 callback, the music steps into genres that didn’t exist in the original. A boy band section, engineered to evoke frosted tips, jerseys, and cargo pants, plays directly off Paul’s on-screen wardrobe and the gentle roasting from his friends. An indie rock passage adds bounce without over-production. By the finale, the piece arrives somewhere close to Hans Zimmer: genuinely cinematic.
Picture lock was essential throughout. When Paul docks the Switch 2 at 0:07, the music surges as if a power plant just came online; a parallel drum hit at 0:11 mirrors the moment the Switch snaps together. The friends’ arrival in Game Chat flips the vibe entirely, and the music shifts with them, amplifying the joke. During the Mario Kart World gameplay sequence, the score ebbs and flows with the on-screen chaos, capturing the fun and trash talk and split-second competitiveness of playing together. The outro brings everything home with the blockbuster-level production the console deserves.
All of it was delivered in 48 hours. Barton kept the process nimble, resisting over-commitment to any single idea so he could pivot without losing the cohesion that the team envisioned from the start.
The Impact
By treating the 1991 recordings as living material rather than a museum piece, the score honors Nintendo’s history without being bound by it. Each section has its own personality and its own world, but still moves together as one. Like the console it celebrates, “Passing of the Gates” holds wildly different experiences under one roof, evolves as it goes, and ultimately turns memory into momentum.