Video Game Melodies That Rip Off Songs We Know - Coincidence Within Reason?

[ColecoFan1981]

When programmers of video games compose a melody and part of it sounds like a song we've all heard before, I'm wondering whether or not that is "coincidence within reason" which means did the programmers actually like the song(s) that the melody(ies) had allegedly ripped off?

Example 1:
The title screen music in (not Super) Mario Brothers (Nintendo NES, Atari 7800, Atari XE-GS) is a coincidental Jimmy Hart version of Petula Clark's 1964 #1 hit "Downtown" for the first two bars of the song. On the Game Boy Advance version packaged within Super Mario Advance: Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World, Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi's Island, Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, a different version of the NES version's title tune is heard, with extra notes preceding the main body of the song (all five titles have varying degrees of arrangement).

"Downtown" is:


Which got into this:


Example 2:
The U.K. race music in Road Rash 3: Tour de Force is snippets of several songs: Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker," Billy Joel's "Sometimes a Fantasy," and the title theme from the TV show Home Improvement.

~Ben