Almost anyone who’s ever played a Nintendo game can hum the themes of Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. Despite assembling some of the most memorable music themes in video game history, Koji Kondo is calm and collected whenever he talks about his career and the stuff he’s done at Nintendo. Kondo currently supervises the creation of music for Nintendo games, but he’s also the sound director and main composer for Mario Maker – a role he admits he hasn’t had in a long time. IGN caught up with Kondo before The Video Game Awards to discuss his early days at Nintendo, his favorite video game music, and more.

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When I look at when I first started, the one thing that’s obviously changed is the number of staff assigned to a title. We have a lot more people assigned to games nowadays.I really learned everything about programming from Mr. Kaneoka, from the very basics. It’s thanks to him that I was able to learn how to program sound effects, and all the basics of sound engineering. The whole engine behind creating sounds via programming, I learned from Mr. Kaneoka.My relationship with Mr. Tanaka was not quite as in-depth since he was actually with another department. Sometimes, I would get some advice from him, or he would offer explanations on the work that he was doing. It was more of a casual relationship, where we would get together and chat from time to time. It wasn’t a deep relationship like I had with Mr. Kaneoka.I came to Nintendo because they had put out some ads saying, ‘Hey, we need some people with musical experience.’ I was the first one to answer that call and be brought into the company. Mr. Tanaka and Mr. Kaneoka were both graduates in electrical engineering. Mr. Tanaka had been in a band as a hobby and Mr. Kaneoka had a lot of interest in music, but neither of them had an educational music in background, per se. The focus was mostly on sound effects and how to create unique and original sounds in that arena.Mr. Kaneoka was also very interested in that and really enjoyed doing it – occasionally, they would add some fanfares and things like that, but that was really the extent of their musical incorporation into games.Meanwhile, other companies in the video game landscape had started paying more attention to music, and adding more music to games. That pushed Nintendo to re-examine their own method of dealing with music and start bringing in more music in addition to just the sound effects.For my own music: the Super Mario theme, the Legend of Zelda theme, and in the current Mario Maker , the Underground Theme remix in the NES edit mode. For music that I didn’t create, I’d say the main theme music for Dragon Quest, the main theme for Wii U Super Smash Bros., and the music from Mappy, an old Namco game.Let’s give it a shot!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.I wasn’t the sound director on Wind Waker, that was done by some other staff members. But I can say that out of all the games that I was not the sound director on, Wind Waker is my favorite.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.I think a lot of the rhythm and instrumentation in Yoshi’s Island was influenced by the African music I was studying then.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 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.It may have been the helicopter music.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.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.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.

Jose Otero is an Associate Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat . You can follow him on Twitter