Koji Kondo’s first version of the Super Mario Bros. theme was turned down. He had written something easygoing to suit the blue sky and green hills on the screen, and it did not feel right. “It didn’t match the rhythm of Mario’s running and jumping,” he told Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata, in 2010. So he played the prototype and wrote again, and the second tune stayed in the game unchanged. It was his second year at Nintendo. A few months later he wrote the music for The Legend of Zelda, and he has stayed at Nintendo ever since.
Fast facts
- Born: 1961, in Nagoya, according to public sources.
- Joined Nintendo: April 1984, the same month as the designer Takashi Tezuka.
- First game: Devil World (1984), then sound effects for Kung-Fu.
- Best-known scores: Super Mario Bros. (1985), The Legend of Zelda (1986), Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario 64.
- Hall of Fame: in 2023 the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences made him the first game music composer in its Hall of Fame.
One of the first two
Kondo learned to play the Electone, Yamaha’s electronic organ, in Yamaha Music classes from kindergarten, and played marimba in his elementary school band. At the Osaka University of Arts he studied a general arts course and played keyboards in an amateur fusion band. In a 2001 interview for the Japanese book series Game Maestro, he said a Nintendo recruitment notice went up at the university in the first year the company hired dedicated sound staff. Nintendo was the only company he applied to.
He started in April 1984. “I was hired along with one other person to be the first music staff,” he told Iwata in 2010. Before then, programmers had made the sounds. Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka had been writing music alongside his programming work, and Iwata admitted that he had made sound effects himself in the Famicom’s early days. Shigeru Miyamoto said that around the time of Donkey Kong Tanaka was the only person who could write music, and he had been warning that Nintendo would be in trouble without sound specialists. Kondo’s first game was Miyamoto’s Devil World, and he helped with the sound effects on Kung-Fu.
Super Mario Bros.
Most early Famicom games got their sound about a month before they were finished. Super Mario Bros. was different: Kondo played it from its experimental stages, when the only Mario was the big one. Miyamoto’s specification described the music above ground as “Western-sounding, percussion and a sound like a whip”. The first piece Kondo finished was the underwater music, which was easy to imagine. The overworld theme took two attempts, and what changed it was playing the game. “I learned the importance of being able to actually play the game and match the music to its rhythms,” he said.
Memory was as tight for sound as for everything else. Kondo reused sounds wherever he could: Mario shrinking and Mario going down a pipe make the same noise, and so do stomping an enemy and swimming. When he was first asked for a jumping sound, he objected that jumping does not make a sound, then played the game and wrote one anyway. At the very end, the programmer Toshihiko Nakago recalled, Kondo said he could loop a tune for the ending in 40 bytes, and the 20 bytes left over paid for a crown on the lives counter. All of it came from the NES sound hardware, with its two pulse channels, triangle, noise channel and sample channel.
Twenty-five years later, Miyamoto told Kondo in the same interview that the underground music had been “an even more perfect fit” than the overworld theme: “He made it with sound effects, but it sounded like music.” Kondo said he could not remember Miyamoto praising him at the time, “so I feel like that’s the first time it ever happened”.
The Legend of Zelda
Work on The Legend of Zelda had started before Super Mario Bros., but Mario was finished first. Kondo’s written request for Zelda’s music came from Tezuka two weeks after Super Mario Bros. went on sale, dated 27 September. It was brief. For the caves it said “short BGM”; for the fairy fountains, “fanfare, sparkly”; and for the opening, “title music”.
Kondo knew the game needed something completely different from Mario. For the scrolling text at the start he arranged Ravel’s Boléro for the Famicom, and for a long time that is what played. Just before the game was finished, the team checked the copyright. Ravel had died 49 years and 11 months earlier, and in Japan the music would not be free to use for another month. The Disk System’s launch could not wait. “So I pulled an all-nighter to compose the opening song,” Kondo said in 2016. “But it’s just an arrangement of music used in the game.” Miyamoto said the incident may be why he likes that opening so much, and compared it to the music of a spaghetti western.
Retro Gamer wrote in 2004 that later Zelda games had surpassed the first in the breadth of their adventures, but that the original’s theme tune, from “its Koji Kondo-composed score”, remained one of the most memorable ever written for a game.
After Mario and Zelda
Kondo went on writing for Nintendo’s biggest games. Nintendo Power printed a photograph of him at work in early 1990, with a caption noting that he “composed the music for SMB 3”. Public lists of NES composers also credit him with Soccer, Ice Hockey, Nazo no Murasamejō and Super Mario Bros. 2. David Sheff’s Game Over (1993) described him as “a brilliant young musician” who wrote the music for all the Super Mario games, and noted that recordings of his music sold well, a symphony had performed his Mario music in Tokyo, and the reggae singer Shinehead had borrowed the Mario theme for the chorus of a song.
The British Nintendo Magazine summed up his record in 1997: from Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario 64 he had scored “more than a dozen” of Nintendo’s best-known games, including Star Fox, Pilotwings and The Legend of Zelda. It named Latin music and jazz among his influences and Henry Mancini, the composer of the Pink Panther theme, as his favourite artist, and reported that Paul and Linda McCartney had greeted him by humming the Mario theme. Edge, reviewing Super Mario 64 in 1996, called him Nintendo’s “in-house sonics supremo”.
Orchestras came late. Talking about The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in 2005, Kondo said the orchestra recorded for its trailer was “the first time I’ve had the chance to work with a full orchestra”.
Looking back in 2016, he said the NES was where he learned how to compose game music and why sound effects matter: “when it comes to the essence of composing game music, the crucial elements haven’t changed at all.” In 2023 the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences inducted him into its Hall of Fame, noting that the same year his Super Mario Bros. “Ground Theme” had been added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress.
Sources
- Nintendo, Iwata Asks: Super Mario Bros. 25th Anniversary, Volume 5, “Original Super Mario Developers” (2010, web), with Miyamoto, Tezuka, Nakago and Kondo: page 2 (joining in April 1984 with Tezuka, the “first music staff”, Tanaka, Devil World and Kung-Fu); page 3 (the 40-byte ending loop and the crown); page 5 (the prototype, the specification’s wording, the underwater music first, the rejected first overworld theme, the underground music, the shared sound effects and the jump sound). https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/wii/mario25th/4/0/
- Nintendo of America, “The Legend of Zelda: Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, Takeshi Tezuka, and Koji Kondo”, by Akinori Sao, for the NES Classic Edition (2016, web): the request dated 27 September, Boléro and the copyright, the all-night title theme, the spaghetti western, and the NES as his “basis”. https://web.archive.org/web/2017/https://www.nintendo.com/nes-classic/the-legend-of-zelda-developer-interview/
- Koji Kondo, interview in Game Maestro (2001), translated by shmuplations (web, secondary): Electone lessons from kindergarten, the marimba, Osaka University of Arts, the recruitment notice and applying only to Nintendo. https://shmuplations.com/kojikondo/
- Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004: The Legend of Zelda and “its Koji Kondo-composed score”.
- Nintendo Power issue 10, January/February 1990, p. 22: photograph of Kondo, who “composed the music for SMB 3”.
- David Sheff, Game Over (1993; GamePress edition, 1999), chapter 3, “I, Mario”, pp. 54–55: Kondo and the Super Mario music, the recordings, the Tokyo performance and Shinehead.
- Nintendo Magazine (UK) issue 58, July 1997, Mario feature, “I am the music man”: his scores, influences and the McCartneys.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: review of Super Mario 64.
- Hyper issue 142, August 2005, p. 25: Kondo on the orchestra for the Twilight Princess trailer.
- NESdev Wiki, “List of NES music composers” (community reference, web, secondary): his NES credits. https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/List_of_NES_music_composers
- Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, “Koji Kondo, Composer and Sound Director, Nintendo”, Hall of Fame, 2023 (web). https://www.interactive.org/special_awards/details.asp?idSpecialAwards=45
- Wikipedia, “Koji Kondo” (web, secondary): date and place of birth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koji_Kondo