Last week, The Legend of Zelda fans got their first proper glimpse at the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake — a game long awaited, particularly as Nintendo’s peers have spent the last decade mining the nostalgia of gamers now in their 30s and 40s with lavish remakes of Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3 and Final Fantasy VII.
Alongside Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life and GoldenEye, Ocarina of Time belonged to that rare generation of games that made the leap to 3D feel like a genuine revolution. These weren’t simply games moving into three dimensions; they were establishing the visual language, cinematic storytelling and conventions that would go on to define modern gaming.
And while Ocarina of Time remains revered for its design, world-building and pioneering approach to 3D adventure, there is one element that arguably lingers more powerfully than any other: the music.
Picture it. You’re ten or eleven. You slap Ocarina of Time’s grey cartridge into your N64, pick up the console’s alien-looking controller and, rather than being greeted by some high-octane sugar rush of a theme tune, you hear a gentle piano melody.
Then Link appears, riding his trusty steed Epona across Hyrule as the moon sets and the sun rises.
Instant vibes.
An immersive, warm blanket of sound draws you in. Not a call to action, but a call to adventure. Exploration. Perhaps even home.
For a generation of millennials, these songs are embedded somewhere deep in our cultural memory. There’s a running joke across TikTok and elsewhere that hearing a few notes of ‘Lost Woods’ is enough to awaken us like sleeper agents.
So who can we thank for this?
Koji Kondo joined Nintendo in 1984 and became one of the most important figures in video game music. Before him, game music could easily be treated as an afterthought: a few catchy melodies bolted onto an otherwise completed piece of software. Kondo helped establish something different. Music could be part of the design itself.
By the time Ocarina of Time arrived, he had already created the definitive musical identities of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. But the N64 offered a new challenge. The move into 3D meant the soundscape had to become three-dimensional too.
Unlike the CD-based PlayStation, the N64 had limited cartridge storage, meaning Kondo couldn’t simply fill the game with hours of pre-recorded audio. Instead, Ocarina of Time could store musical instructions alongside banks of instrument samples, allowing the game to generate much of what we heard as it played.
Kondo was therefore composing not simply songs, but systems for playing songs.
Take Hyrule Field. Rather than having one enormous track loop endlessly as Link crossed the landscape, Kondo created multiple eight-measure musical components that could be combined and selected dynamically. As Link approached enemies, the music could transition seamlessly into a battle motif before returning to the exploration theme.
Today, adaptive game music is commonplace. In 1998, it was extraordinary.
Kondo has said the idea took root because he didn’t want players trudging home from a dungeon only to find the exact same loop still waiting for them.
Then there was the Ocarina itself.
The player learns melodies using just the A button and four C-buttons. From that tiny musical vocabulary came ‘Zelda’s Lullaby’, ‘Saria’s Song’, ‘Song of Time’, ‘Epona’s Song’ and ‘Song of Storms.’
The important thing is that you didn’t merely hear these melodies. You physically learned them. Music became a mechanic, a key, a spell and a language. You don’t just listen to Hyrule.
You play it.
Weird fantasy
On paper, Zelda is classic fantasy. A young hero leaves home, discovers his destiny, gathers allies, faces evil and saves the kingdom. The Hero’s Journey, familiar from Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and countless myths before them.
But Zelda has always filtered those Western fantasy conventions through a distinctly Japanese sensibility.
Nature in Hyrule isn’t simply scenery. It is alive. The Great Deku Tree isn’t just an enormous tree; he is a conscious spiritual being. The landscape is populated by creatures whose existence blurs the boundary between nature, deity and monster.
There are clear echoes of Shinto ideas around kami — spirits associated with aspects of the natural world — and purification, with Link repeatedly restoring places corrupted by evil. Then Zelda gets weird — and the seeds of that strangeness were planted in 1993’s Link’s Awakening for the Game Boy.
During development, director Takashi Tezuka wanted the handheld adventure to have the feel of Twin Peaks, then a cultural phenomenon in Japan. He was attracted to its small-town cast of strange, suspicious characters and wanted Koholint Island to have a similarly distinctive personality — and the experiment stuck.
Nintendo’s own developers later acknowledged that the influence carried directly into Ocarina of Time and its sequel Majora’s Mask. Aonuma said the Ocarina team had all played Link’s Awakening and therefore understood “how far they could go” with the series.
Suddenly, Hyrule wasn’t populated by anonymous fantasy villagers. It was full of eccentrics, obsessives and people who seemed to exist at a slightly different frequency to everyone else — and that eccentricity feeds straight into the music. Take ‘Song of Storms.’
It comes from one of the strangest corners of the game: a manic man endlessly spinning around a windmill, furiously blaming Link for a storm that occurred seven years earlier. The melody itself is circular, infectious and faintly unhinged, matching the visual rhythm of the windmill and the obsessive energy of its inhabitant.
It’s funny, but also slightly disturbing. The character, the location and the music are all telling the same story. That’s Ocarina of Time at its best: the world’s oddness is not just visual. It sounds strange too.
The music becomes the world
But strangeness is only half of Hyrule’s musical character — the other half is comfort.
Kondo understood that Zelda’s music didn’t need to constantly announce how epic everything was. Sometimes it simply needed to make somewhere feel like home.
Zora’s Domain is gentle and aquatic. Kakariko Village feels intimate. Lon Lon Ranch has the warmth of a folk tune. Lost Woods is playful and slightly unhinged. Then there are the darker spaces: the Forest Temple, Shadow Temple and Bottom of the Well.
Each location gets its own musical identity before the player has fully understood what that place is.
Kondo was thinking about sound spatially, too. When recreating the title music for Ocarina of Time 3D, he noticed that the ocarina lacked its original reverb. He had imagined it as though someone unseen were playing somewhere deep inside the forest, rather than sitting directly in front of the listener.
That small detail says a lot about his approach.
He wasn’t just asking: Does this melody sound good?
He was asking: Where is this sound coming from?
That is the difference between a soundtrack and a soundscape.
The songs we carried with us
This is perhaps why Ocarina of Time has had such an unusually long musical afterlife.
Its melodies have been rearranged, remixed and reinterpreted far beyond the world of games. BADBADNOTGOOD famously performed a medley of Zelda themes, treating Kondo’s compositions not as novelty video game tunes but as material capable of carrying jazz improvisation, rhythm and harmonic reinterpretation.
The rise of lo-fi and chillhop has provided another natural home. ‘Zora’s Domain’, ‘Kakariko Village’ and ‘Great Fairy Fountain’ already possess the qualities modern chill music often tries to manufacture: repetition, warmth, space and nostalgia.
They were halfway there already.
But Ocarina of Time also helped prove something bigger: that games could be art.
Not entertainment alone. Not just toys. Art with direction, atmosphere, character, visual language and — crucially — music that could stand outside the game itself.
The upcoming Zelda 40th anniversary concerts are perhaps the clearest expression of that legacy. Music originally squeezed into the limitations of a Nintendo 64 cartridge is now being performed for concert audiences who can recognise the melodies before the first phrase has even finished.
That is quite a journey.
The grey cartridge is long gone. The CRT televisions have disappeared. The N64 controller increasingly feels like an archaeological artefact.
But play a few notes of Song of Storms, Zelda’s Lullaby or Saria’s Song and suddenly you’re ten years old again.
Back in Hyrule.
That’s the strange power of Ocarina of Time. It didn’t just give us a world to explore. It gave us a world we could remember by sound.
