It takes just eight notes for everyone to immediately recognize one of the most iconic themes in the history of video games: Koji Kondo, who at that time had only composed the score for Super Mario Bros (as well as other minor games), created a song in 1986 that even now, forty years later, is still used and recognized by several generations of gamers. It’s not easy, especially considering he only had 24 hours to come up with it. This is how masterpieces are created.
Save Hyrule to the rhythm of bolero!
Originally, The Legend of Zelda for NES was going to be a very different game from what we ended up seeing. For example, Shigeru Miyamoto has said that the fragments of the Triforce were electronic circuits that would cause Link to travel between the past and the future, something that was later extensively explored in the saga. And this all came from the idea of creating a small miniature garden for players, recalling their childhood experiences playing in Kyoto. Well, in the end, it strayed “a little” from that initial idea, but everything has to have a seed, right?
The Legend of Zelda, the first title in the saga, drew so much from the classics that the original screenwriter, Takashi Tezuka, confessed to being inspired by The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien (even though there were no boomerangs there, at least as far as we know), and the soundtrack consisted of a looping theme: Ravel’s Bolero. This theme, one of the most famous in the history of music, was performed at the Paris Opera for the first time on November 22, 1928, to great public acclaim. According to reports, in the middle of the performance, a woman started shouting “Ravel is crazy!”. The composer himself responded shortly after that, if that was what she thought, then she had understood the musical piece well. Genius and figure.
This anger was habitual in Ravel, who did not hold back when something did not seem right to him. For example, on May 4, 1930, when Toscanini played the score in Paris faster than originally marked, Ravel confronted him after the concert, telling him it was too fast, to which the other musician replied “You know nothing about your own music. It’s the only way to save the work. When I play it at your tempo, it is not effective.” The original author ended the argument by saying, “Then don’t play it.” The beef continued for years and never fully calmed down.
And what does all this have to do with Zelda and Nintendo? Well, more than it seems, because if you pay attention to the years, you will discover that, at the time of finishing The Legend of Zelda… Ravel’s Bolero was not yet in the public domain. In Japan it takes 50 years after the composer’s death, and in 1985 only 47 years had passed. The solution? Call Kondo quickly to compose a new main theme… in 24 hours!
As he tells it, “the tempo of the Bolero matched perfectly with the speed of the home screen. But I remember that just before, when we had to complete the final ROM, I was told that sadly the copyright had not expired, so I had to compose a new piece of music that night. I remember I did it in a day. You know, ‘da-da-da-da’, it was done in a day“. It’s not that he’s a superman: the game theme was already done, but he fixed it, staying up all night, to make it work well on the home screen. Things of being a genius.
