Discover Top Posts Tagged with #koji kondo

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Nintendo EAD Nintendo 64 1998

#the legend of zelda: ocarina of time #nintendo #nintendo 64 #the legend of zelda #ocarina of time #loz oot #title scren #title theme #koji kondo #game soundtrack #hyrule field #zora river #link #epona #scenery #90s #N64

Visit Original Link

🥳HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY, ZELDA!!!🥳

#The Legend of Zelda #Zelda #LoZ #Koji Kondo #Nintendo #Live Performance #NES #oh my godddf #+

Thinking about how Skyward Sword's score uses a lot of the same instrumentation and style as the Mario Galaxy score. Thinking about how Ocarina of Time's score has subtle similarities to the Mario 64 score, but in an entirely different way compared to SS vs. Galaxy. Thinking about how video game music was simple by necessity, had its own Romantic era in the 2010s, and is swinging back to Minimalism (see Breath of the Wild) as a reaction. Thinking about video game music as a microcosm of the history of Western art music, but with the key difference of having largely the same composers throughout its history following along with each change in style, taste, and technological advancement. Thinking about how Koji Kondo has trackable compositional phases throughout his career. Thinking about whether people who were alive at the same time as Beethoven and Mozart knew that they were in the presence of giants. Thinking about how I'm alive at the same time as some of most brilliant compositional minds in human history. Thinking about how brilliant Koji Kondo is. Thinking about how brilliant Koji Kondo is. Thinking about how brilliant Koji Kondo is.

#legend of zelda #koji kondo #he's given us so much 😭#loz

Visit Original Link

Astral Observatory // The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

#legend of zelda #majora's mask #tloz mm #ost #soundtrack #koji kondo #nintendo #n64

40th Zelda Anniversary

Of all the Zelda titles, this is the one we know the MOST about; they've discussed it in interviews for years. For the 40th anniversary let's go down memory lane with some fun quotes

The most important people during development of Zelda 1:

Shigeru Miyamoto: Producer, Co-Director

Takashi Tezuka: Co-Director

Toshihiko Nakago: Programming lead

Koji Kondo: Music and sound

Miyamoto, Tezuka, and Nakago have been described as the "golden triangle" by Satoru Iwata.

Shigeru Miyamoto is of course commonly touted as the creator of the Zelda series, but I think Takashi Tezuka deserves neaerly as much credit; I've labelled him the co-creator of the series in my posts before.

This same group also made Super Mario Bros together at the same time.

So let's look at the very beginnings of Zelda!

For instance: it started off as a game for the Nintendo Vs System, NOT the Famicom Disk System.

The details of how this would have worked are pretty unclear!

At one point it was also planned to be a dungeon maker game with no overworld component: one player would design dungeons, the other would play them. Unclear if this was before or after the swap to the Famicom Disk System.

Zelda was at one point planned to be a time-traveling game with sci-fi elements. The Triforce pieces would have been computer chips! This story also explains where Link's name comes from.

I think this brings us to the natural next topic: What were the inspirations and influences on the Zelda 1 team, especially MIyamoto? Some of these are well-known, some less so.

The famous stories of Miyamoto finding a cave and exploring as a kid:

Miyamoto would later describe the Zelda series as being "all about hiking":

Miyamoto was inspired in part by the way that characters could grow in RPGs, in games like Ultima and Black Onyx, but he didn't like the turn-based combat. He was also influenced by the treasure hunting adventure of Indiana Jones.

It seems LIKELY to me that Zelda was also influenced by action RPGs like Hydlide, Dragon Slayer 1 and Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu, and Tower of Druaga. Those were all noteworthy pre-Zelda titles. But I have never seen explicit acknowledgement of this.

So some goals for Zelda 1 included sensations of growth, hiking, and treasure hunting. Remember that this was developed at the SAME TIME as Super Mario Bros., so some goals in Zelda were specifically designed to be Mario's opposite. Mario was linear, Zelda was not.

They were afraid that gamers would be "bored and stressed" by Zelda 1's non-linearity!:

There are some other fun anecdotes from the production.

For instance, Miyamoto and Tezuka each drew one half of the Zelda 1 world each.

During development they simply called it "Adventure Title", but they eventually settled on the name "The Legend of Zelda: The Hyrule Fantasy". The initial plan was to use "The Hyrule Fantasy" as the name of the series.

And of course we can't forget the Copyright Incident:

This is only scratching the surface! There is a whole realm of interviews about this game out there. This is our page for Zelda 1 if you want to do more reading!:

https://www.notion.so/hyruleinterviews/The-Legend-of-Zelda-fabdf1ba33ba46d6aae4da8b362870c8

I hope you enjoyed the thread!

#Zelda #Legend of Zelda #Shigeru Miyamoto #Takashi Tezuka #MiyamotoQuote #TezukaQuote #Toshihiko Nakago #NakagoQuote #Koji Kondo #KondoQuote #TheLegendOfZeldaQuote

Something that makes me a little insane is that Majora’s Mask and Code: Veronica came out within a couple of months of each other in Japan in 2000.

They were both direct follow-ups to two of 1998’s defining games—Ocarina of Time and Resident Evil 2—and therefore inherited the fairly miserable assignment of following games that had already become monumental. How do you follow something considered one of the greatest accomplishments of its generation? Apparently, in both cases, you make a deeply strange nightmare that resembles its predecessor just enough to make all of its differences feel even stranger.

Neither game attempts to recreate the triumph immediately preceding it. Majora’s Mask takes Ocarina’s familiar models, mechanics and faces and traps them inside three repeating days in a parallel world awaiting its destruction. Characters have schedules. People continue going to work, planning weddings, arguing, hiding and grieving beneath a moon that is visibly coming down to kill them. Link does not simply collect new tools; he wears the remains of the dead and temporarily becomes them.

Code: Veronica, meanwhile, takes the structure of classic Resident Evil out of Raccoon City and drops it into an absurdly elaborate Gothic family tragedy. It begins with Claire looking for her brother and eventually becomes a story about another pair of siblings entirely: an extinct aristocratic dynasty, inherited madness, secret identities, dolls, music boxes, private prisons, a military island and an Antarctic palace. It is Resident Evil by way of a diseased fairy tale and a particularly feverish stage melodrama.

They are also both made from recognizable remains. Majora reuses Ocarina’s characters while assigning them different lives. Code: Veronica retains Resident Evil’s fixed perspectives, keys, puzzles, resource management and backtracking while using new technology to render its environments in real time. Both feel familiar at first glance, but the familiarity becomes uncanny. These are the people and rules you recognize, rearranged into worlds where something is profoundly wrong.

Both games were successful and remained important to their series, but they have the aura of cult classics because neither one became the model for what followed. Zelda never returned to a world quite as intimate, scheduled and apocalyptic as Termina. Resident Evil never again combined its old survival-horror structure with quite this degree of ornate, deranged, operatic family drama. Later games borrowed pieces from them, but the particular doors these two games opened seemed to close behind them.

I love them because they feel like strange evolutionary dead ends: two enormous series standing at the edge of a new era and, instead of safely repeating themselves, briefly wandering into some beautiful and deeply peculiar territory they would never inhabit in quite the same way again.

Two weird sequels from the year 2000. Two familiar worlds transformed into bad dreams. Two games given the impossible job of following masterpieces—and becoming far stranger, sadder and more singular than anyone could reasonably have expected.

✦ An addendum, because apparently these two games also agreed that following a masterpiece should involve mildly tormenting the player.

Both are famously capable of frustrating anyone who actually decides to play them, although they do it in revealingly different ways. Majora’s Mask turns time itself into a limited resource. Its challenge is not simply defeating enemies or solving isolated puzzles, but learning an entire clockwork world: who will be where, which events depend upon one another, how much can be accomplished before the cycle ends and when to accept that the only way forward is to surrender your progress and begin the three days again. It demands planning, memory and a willingness to fail before you fully understand what the game was asking.

Code: Veronica is punitive in the more traditional language of survival horror. It asks the player to ration ammunition and healing supplies, anticipate dangerous encounters, remember distant locks and mechanisms, and decide what to carry without knowing exactly what waits ahead. Its traps, long journeys, character transitions and notoriously cruel bosses can make a mistake committed hours earlier suddenly reveal itself as a catastrophe. Where Majora’s Mask makes you fear running out of time, Code: Veronica makes you fear arriving at the next horror with the wrong things in your pockets.

Their difficulty is therefore part of the same quality I love in their stories: neither game is especially interested in making its strange new world comfortable for the player. One forces you to learn the rhythms of a doomed place by repeatedly living through its final days. The other makes survival depend upon respecting a sprawling Gothic death trap that refuses to explain itself in advance.

They can be maddening, and sometimes downright unfair, but that friction is part of what makes them linger: playing either one feels like being trapped inside the peculiar obsessions of the people who designed it.