“…and then he takes the blindfold off and amazes the world.” ←via Joshua. Any ’80s kid should be able to appreciate it. I keep watching it over and over again, hoping to perhaps learn at least some of it through osmosis. The previous champ has been thoroughly dethroned.

Looking for a higher-quality clip, a quick google brings up this apparently earlier, less-refined performance which links to these hand-transcribed video game themes. Awesome. Now maybe i can try to figure out some of those parts. Sans blindfold, of course.

Further digging leads to a better quality, longer clip with more parts ←via. For some reason, it wouldn’t download properly from the embedded link i extracted from the Media tab of Page Info in Firefox, so i nabbed it with good ol’ Net Transport. Anyway, this guy is known as the blindfolded pianist according to the blindfolded mario pianist FAQ, and has been playing for thirteen years. I can only hope to have the dedication to stick with something that long. I’d say it’s paid off for him. He plays it all by ear from the original game music, and adds a little of his own flair.

At his site, theblindfoldedpianist.com, both the original video and the even more incredible second one are available, along with a clip of him playing against a metronome to prove his speed on the last part of the medley. There’s also sheet music rendered as PNG images of the various songs he’s transcribed. I went with the PDFs at Brian Auyeung’s site mentioned above because images of sheet music don’t print so well. The discussion at gamingforce.com produced a score of the entire performance in the video.

Impressive work all around.

update 20040901-0240: New video of blindfolded performing his original composition “Images of 9/11”.

update: 20040901–2153: Oh, and how could i forget about the good ol’ Neskimos? Their rendition of “Mario” is pretty awesome.