Koji Kondo shares music trivia about various Nintendo games
IGN just published another interview with Koji Kondo, the man behind much of the famous music in Nintendo’s games. You can find the full discussion here, though we’ve pulled out a few excerpts below.
What you’ll find after the break is music trivia about various Nintendo games. Kondo shared tidbits about games like Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 3D World, and more. You’ll also find some comments about why he wanted the Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D development team to stay faithful to the sound from the original game.
On Super Mario 3D World…
Kondo: I created around three songs for that title, and they had some professional musicians come in and perform the music. I guess the takeaway is that they put so much of their own spirit and soul into the music, that it really exceeded even my expectations. I was super pumped over how well the music sounded in the end.
On Star Fox 64…
Kondo: For Star Fox 64, I was influenced quite a bit by the Thunderbirds TV show. I picked up some pretty good tidbits from that music.
On Yoshi’s Island…
Kondo: I think a lot of the rhythm and instrumentation in Yoshi’s Island was influenced by the African music I was studying then.
On PilotWings…
Kondo: That was another one where almost all of the music sound effects were done by other staff members. That was one of my first forays into being a sound director. I remember creating just one piece of music for that (possibly the helicopter music) to give the other staffers a sense of the direction we wanted for that title. It was a way to lay the groundwork for them to go through and score the rest of the game.
On Super Mario Bros…
Kondo: In the original Underground Theme, some measures were in 4/4, while others were in 3/4. This was done on purpose, to make it arrhythmic and difficult to count, and create that creepy feeling we wanted players to have when they went into an underground section. In subsequent Mario games that used that music, we had rearranged it in 4/4. It wasn’t until I was working on remixing the Underground Theme for Mario Maker that I remembered the way the time signatures of the original track would switch between 4/4 and 3/4.
On Punch-Out!! for arcade…
Kondo: So that was actually before I’d officially joined the company. Mr. Kaneoka had actually given me a sort of challenge, where he wanted me to create some original music that had a sports TV-themed vibe, using the three notes that were available in the arcade version. That was like homework for me before I started working for the company.
On why Kondo requested the Ocarina of Time 3D dev team to stay faithful to the original N64 sound…
Kondo: As far as cleaning up the quality of the sound itself, of course that’s something we wanted to do. We did have them go through and make sure we took out miscellaneous impurities in the sound. But the way the gameplay and the music were tied together through tempo was something we really took a lot of time adjusting and making just right in the original.
I was worried that when they were doing the 3DS version, with the increased processing power, that the game might play a bit differently, and we didn’t want the music to be sped up even slightly, or slowed down even slightly, based on the technology they were using. All I asked was that they paid a lot of attention to how the music interacted with the game, and that the tempo had the same balance. We didn’t want to lose the way that worked in the original game. I just asked that they stayed true to that. For instance, the transition between music and sound effects.
As you know, a lot of times music is about not just what’s playing, but when it’s not playing, and how that silence impacts the time when there is sound. That’s just one area where, again, the tempo had a huge role in how the game felt when being played.
