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A young fan of regional jazz fusion acts Casiopea and Sadao Watanabe, as well as the grandiose prog of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, he rolled out the Osaka School of Arts in 1984 and straight into a job at his first and only company, Nintendo. Koji Kondo understood the medium of video game music better than anyone. By eschewing what was or wasn’t in vogue, Kondo instead hit upon timelessness. In the 21 years since its release, Kondo’s score remains the one component of the game that has not dated, even as every facet of the industry has advanced by orders of magnitude. An entire generation grew up around the explosive popularity of the game in the late 1990s, which explains why mash-up producers feel compelled to slap Clipse over “Lost Woods,” or why countless symphonic orchestras tour their own reinterpretations, and why a genre named Zeldawave exists at all.įrom the stirring opening screen to the weepy final credits, the music that flows through Ocarina of Time was a generational Rosetta Stone, encompassing Gregorian chants, Arabic scales, harp, flamenco, dark ambience, and at least one rip-off of Gustav Holst’s The Planets-an unforced and generous way to transmit those sounds into the homes of millions. It quickly took on a second life as open-source material, where it was enjoyed, adapted, and shared. The score, composed by Nintendo’s in-house MVP Koji Kondo, was the first that truly thrived outside of its originating medium, a game centered around an ancient flute-like instrument.