Koji Kondo

Koji Kondo is the famous composer of most of the music from the Zelda series and many other Nintendo franchises, including Mario.

Koji Kondo was born on August 13, 1960 in Nagoya, Japan. Even at an early age, he was composing simple little tunes. When he was seventeen, he decided to make music his profession.

In the 1980's, he heard of a gaming company, Nintendo, that was looking for musicians for its new gaming system, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Although he never considered video game music before, Kondo san gave it a chance in 1983. It was odd to Koji. Suddenly, he was limited to four instruments, thanks to limitations in the NES chips.

To this day, he still works for Nintendo, having composed music for the SNES, the Nintendo 64, the Nintendo Gamecube, and the Wii. This allows him to greatly expand upon his original visions in older games, and today he records his music with CD quality.

He has composed the music to The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask (with Toru Minigeshi), The Wind Waker (with Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, and Toru Minigeshi), and Twilight Princess (with Toru Minigeshi and Asuka Ota), just to name a few. His music has become very well known and popular, going so far as to have the Super Mario Bros. theme becoming a ringtone!