Nintendo

Listen to Two Songs That Clearly Influenced Zelda and Mario Composer Koji Kondo

Over the weekend, I came across this article at NintendoLife explaining that legendary composer Koji Kondo (aka the VGM god who worked on Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, among others) was inspired by the work of British rock bands from the 1970s, such as Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. While I was totally fine with learning only that bit of info from the article, I was still left wanting more. Which tracks in particular inspired Kondo, I thought, reminding myself that my knowledge of acts like Deep Purple is limited to their biggest hits and not much else.

So then I scrolled down to the comments section, as I do on just about any site, and found some extremely useful comments from ollibald. He or she pointed out that Kondo was very likely directly inspired by two songs, which I’m embedding below.

First up is Deep Purple’s “April,” which Ollibald said sounded a lot like the main theme and dungeon music from the original Legend of Zelda. Sure enough, he or she is 100 percent right. Listen to it below and try to argue otherwise. Seriously, just try it.

And then there is the track “Let’s Not Talk About It” by Friendship, a one-off act led by Lee Ritenour. Ollibald noted that this track simply had to inspire the underworld music of Super Mario Bros. that’s been heard throughout the entire series. Well, just stream the track below and there’s no doubting it once that bassline comes in.

Is your mind completely blown like mine? I hope so.