25 Years of Ocarina of Time

ISSUE #239

25 years ago, one of the most influential and generically expansive collections of songs ever made was released, but you wouldn’t find it with Aeroplane on too many best-of lists. It came courtesy of Koji Kondo, Nintendo’s in-house composer and music director, as the score to Ocarina of Time, the fifth edition of The Legend of Zelda.

Tears of the Kingdom, the nineteenth in that saga, was finally released last Friday. It’s all we’ve been playing ever since. It sold 10 million copies in the first three days of its release, the fastest selling Nintendo game in America. While no outlier for the series—the original is the fourth best-selling NES game of all time, and Ocarina itself beat out Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, Banjo-Kazooie, and StarCraft as the highest-selling game of 1998, despite not being released until November 21—the massive popularity of Tears is largely due to its predecessor, Breath of the Wild, and the continued and extended reach of the Nintendo Switch into demographics that might not otherwise buy games.

Every Zelda game is perfect, in my eyes, and Tears is no exception. These later games, however, take an entirely different approach to music than their predecessors, largely eschewing the Kondonian romanticism that swept through the N64 games and going for a hollowed-out, negative-space approach—notable, because the music has always been the reason Zelda stands out as the greatest of all time.

Music was baked into the franchise from the beginning, but Ocarina of Time was the game that fully embraced it as part of the world and mythos. Not many games revolve around an ancient wind instrument, and in later entries, players can noodle on guitars, bagpipes, bongos, and even a conductor’s baton. A large portion of my play time as a kid was improvising on these virtual instruments and learning to play real-life songs in the fields of Hyrule.

Only a franchise with as a heart as big as Zelda would make so much out of music in games, and Kondo is a huge part of that focus. His global tastes defined the sound of Ocarina of Time, and thus the sound of generations. Koji Kondo spent his days crate digging in Kyoto while writing the score, flipping through the global music sections of record stores until he found the perfect blend of musical geography for Link’s globe-trotting adventure. Flamenco, klezmer, Arabic scale structures, full-scale choirs, harps, an Armenian duduk—genres and instruments from every corner of the world were used to make Kondo’s timeless melodies, which often came to him at home in the bath.

We have Koji Kondo to thank for Zelda’s staying power. The original soundtrack to The Ocarina of Time is one of the 100 greatest albums of all time. We’ve had its genius for 25 years now—it will stand tall for centuries, a temple of time.

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