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Better than barbershop: Amazing a cappella renditions from Street Fighter and other classic Japanese games

I’ve never done the math, but I can confidently say the amount of time I spent as a kid standing in line at an arcade to play the classic fighting game Street Fighter II totals somewhere in the dozens of hours.

As a result of all that waiting around to dragon punch people, the game’s soundtrack is permanently hard-wired into my brain. I’ll occasionally find myself unconsciously humming the various Street Fighter II character themes, and while the specific title may be different, I’m sure gamers everywhere have certain pieces of background music stuck in their heads, too.

What separates YouTube user Smooth McGrove from the rest of us though, aside from a glorious beard, is his ability to near-perfectly replicate every single note of the arrangement from iconic video game tunes, using nothing but his own voice.

Here’s Mr. McGroove’s rendition of Street Fighter II’s Ken stage.

Along with the Guile theme from the same game.

His specialty is covers of soundtracks for games for the Super NES, one of the last major consoles running off of cartridges and thus employing synthesized sounds to replicate instruments rather than just recording the real thing on a CD. McGroove’s repertoire spans the life of the system, and features themes from launch title F-Zero as well as fan favorite RPGs Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger, both of which came towards the end of the Super NES’ life cycle.

Of course, he’s also not afraid to take on more modern or compositions, such as this piece from the series of Touhou Project shooters.

McGroove’s newest video, the Ken theme above, was posted to YouTube just two days ago, and already gamers are inundating him with requests for his next project. They may have to wait a while, as depending on the song, McGroove does as many as 12 performances to produce the sounds he layers together for the final version, as shown in these pieces from Final Fantasy VII and Castelvania.

Thankfully, each song is catchy enough that we doubt anyone will walk way after one listening, and if that still isn’t enough to tide you over while waiting for McGroove’s next tune, all of the videos are worth multiple viewings to try to spot when his adorable black cat shows up.

Sources: Hachimakiko, Game Spark

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