Kōji Kondō
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Koji Kondo was born on August 13, 1960 in Nagoya, Japan in the Aichi Prefecture. His love for music appeared early in his life when he would create short tunes for fun, and by seventeen he began to study music professionally.
In the early 1980's Kondo heard that a company called Nintendo was looking for music composers to create music for videogames. Kondo never thought of composing music for games before, but he decided to try it out and in 1983 he was hired. He felt very confined to writing music on the Famicom because it had such a low quality of music, but as Nintendo released new systems, the quality of music also increased.
Kondo went on to compose music for some of the biggest known titles for Nintendo including the Mario and Zelda series. To this day, Kondo continues to work with Nintendo making music for video games.
Kondo's style shows elements of Jazz, Classical, and Latin influences with a cinematic theme that have remained fairly similar throughout his career. His music has been released on a multitude of albums. Some have drawn a parallel calling him the John Williams of videogames.
Music Composition
NES
At the time, Nintendo required their main composers such as Hirokazu Tanaka and Akito Nakatsuka to write their own sound engines for the NES/Famicom, so Koji programmed a sound driver on the Family BASIC computer in 6502 assembly.
SNES
Koji composed his music on an electronic keyboard and then programmed it into the game. It is likely that the instrument samples came from his electronic keyboard but it is unknown what the make or model is on his keyboard.
Gameography
Picture Gallery
Unknown source.
Koji during the development of SMW; [1].
Links
- vgmonline.net/kojikondo - Detailed biography.
- ign.com/articles/2007/03/12/koji-kondo-an-interview-with-a-legend - IGN interview.
- gamesradar.com/zelda-past-and-future-interview-koji-kondo-and-eiji-aonuma - Games Radar interview.
- originalsoundversion.com/koji-kondo-talks-ocarina-of-time-gives-details-on-skyward-sword - OSV interview.
- glitterberri.com/ocarina-of-time/special-interview-koji-kondo - Interview.
- iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/zelda-ocarina-of-time/0/0 - Nintendo interview.
- youtube.com/watch?v=5ilJCerCucA - Video interview.
