The music of The Legend of Zelda

There isn't much music in the original Zelda outing, no, but some of it has persisted throughout the series, and it's wrapped up in a fascinating bit of tech.

This column is “The music of,” in which I’ll go into detail on the soundtrack or a piece of music from a video game. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

If you mention “the Hyrule Field theme” to someone, it’s likely they’ll be thinking of a different version than whichever is in your own head. It’s a song that has so many iterations and permutations, that’s arranged again and again whenever there’s a Hyrule Field to cross and even sometimes when there isn’t, as is the case in games like Majora’s Mask.

All the way back in 1986 and 1987, the track wasn’t referred to as such: it was just known as “Overworld” or “Overworld BGM” in the Famicom Disk System and in the NES The Legend of Zelda. It wasn’t ubiquitous yet, it was merely the song used in the series’ first game in all of the above-ground portions of the game, and it was only alluded to at the start of the overworld theme in the series’ first sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, before that song moved into becoming very much its own thing.

It’s persisted throughout the years despite the instantaneous shift away from it, though, much like how the series came back around to a topdown action-adventure model after its brief foray into the sidescrolling action RPG setup of Zelda II. And now it’s one of the most famous pieces of video game music going. And how could it not be, when an astounding number of Zelda games are some of the greatest and/or most important in a medium and industry that’s grown by leaps and bounds since ‘86?

Image credit: MobyGames

While the “Overworld” theme isn’t the only track that will be the focus of this feature, it is worth pointing out that the original The Legend of Zelda didn’t have all that much music. It’ll take you about 7-9 minutes, depending on how long whoever is hosting the soundtrack is letting some songs loop, to listen to not just every piece of music in the game but also each sound effect. What’s behind the little bit of music there is, however, as well as regional differences in the game’s sound, combine with the magnitude of that first overworld theme’s staying power to be worth the deeper dive.

In 1986, video games were still feeling out what role music even played in a game. Just six years prior, Namco’s Rally-X was the first game to feature a continuous and melodic background track that was always playing, instead of just featuring short jingles at the start or end of a playthrough or stage. Space Invaders, released in 1978, had a continuous track, but it was just four looping notes and played not through a sound chip made with music in mind, but through the same hardware that allowed for sound effects in arcade games. And, no offense meant, it sounds like it, too.

In a Game Developer (née Gamasutra) interview with famed Nintendo composer Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka, Alexander Brandon asked “what it was like working with the technology to create music for the original Nintendo games” that released in arcades and on non-Nintendo platforms in the days before the Famicom/NES. Tanaka’s response shows you just how different things were in the era before dedicated sound chips meant for music:

Most music and sound in the arcade era (Donkey Kong and Mario Brothers) was designed little by little, by combining transistors, condensers, and resistance. And sometimes, music and sound were even created directly into the CPU port by writing 1s and 0s, and outputting the wave that becomes sound at the end.

In the era when ROM capacities were only 1K or 2K, you had to create all the tools by yourself. The switches that manifest addresses and data were placed side by side, so you have to write something like "1, 0, 0, 0, 1" literally by hand. Such prehistoric work makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Which explains why the original arcade edition of Donkey Kong sounds the way it does — the songs are catchy, remixes and arrangements of them used in future Donkey Kong games were right to do so, but the actual sound quality just wasn’t there yet due to the lack of dedicated tools and storage capacity for them.

In 1980, the year Rally-X was released, half of that problem began to be solved across the industry, as programmable sound chips (PSGs) were more common in arcade games, which allowed for additional tonality and “bigger” pieces of music. Even with the advent of PSGs, though, space was still an issue for music. Looping was a common practice to work around this. As Karen Collins notes in Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, looping was both an aesthetic choice and one made to combat hardware limitations, but it was more of the latter in the earliest days of PSGs given the constraints Tanaka mentioned in his interview.

The Legend of Zelda released within this environment where PSGs were common, but storage solutions were still a real problem for console games. Which is why, as excellent as something like the “Underworld BGM” track is in the game, it’s still just a looping 19 seconds or so. What makes it stand out, outside of the quality of composer Koji Kondo’s work in general, is that these 19 seconds are full of various sounds playing concurrently. The Famicom/NES had a five-channel PSG made special for the system, designed by sound engineer and composer Yukio Kaneoka, which allowed for this sort of thing. As Collins explained (p. 25):

There were two pulse-wave channels capable of about eight octaves, with four duty cycle options to set the timbre. As well, one of the pulse-wave channels had a frequency sweep function that could create portamento-like effects, useful for UFOs or laser gun sound effects. A triangle wave channel was one octave lower than that of the pulse waves, and was more limited in pitch options, having only a 4-bit frequency control. The fourth, the noise channel, could generate white noise, which was useful for effects or percussion. The fifth channel was a sampler, also known as the delta modulation channel (DMC), which had two methods of sampling. The first method was pulse code modulation, which was often used for speech, such as in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! (Nintendo, 1987) or Tengen’s Gauntlet 2 (1990), and the second was known as direct memory access. This form of sampling was only 1-bit, and was more frequently used for sounds of short duration, such as sound effects.

Collins went on to explain that the three tone channels were used in “a fairly conventional way, with one channel for lead, one for accompaniment, and one for bass (and noise or DMC for percussion). The two pulse channels commonly worked as a chord or solo lead, with the triangle channel as a bass accompaniment.” The limitations of that triangle channel were the reason for its use, since it had a lower pitch, anyway.

If you don’t know exactly what all of that means, don’t worry: the key takeaway is that the industry had moved away from making music and sound effects happen on hardware that wasn’t designed with that in mind, to creating multi-channel sound chips dedicated to the idea of making music a priority, which in turn would further open the industry up away from sound engineers and composers being one and the same.

Another win for 1980s Japanese box art against its North American competition. Image credit: MobyGames

Nintendo wasn’t necessarily alone at the forefront here, as Sega’s early consoles had PSGs and incorporated FM synth capabilities as well, and arcade developers of the time were moving on to 16-bit hardware and their own FM synth sound, but Nintendo were the makers of the console that kept the industry from going under and helped solidify the continued production of living room platforms. So yeah, they get some credit there as the leading sound of that space. The storage issue still needed to be solved, but Nintendo was working on that, too. One of their early solutions was the Famicom Disk System add-on, available only in Japan.

The Famicom Disk System (FDS) released in 1986, and had a three-year run where it mattered because of the limitations of cartridge hardware. Rewritable cartridges were not an in-use thing at the time, which is why games used password systems to “save” progress instead of battery backups. As cartridge technology improved, though, allowing for vaster storage options and in-game saves, the FDS was no longer necessary for these purposes. Which is probably part of the reason it never made it out of Japan, since North America was already on a multi-year delay for so many games. One other thing the FDS had besides this additional tech to make up for the cartridges that were missing necessary features was a sixth sound channel that worked alongside the existing five of the Famicom. This channel was for “wavetable synth,” which allowed not just more sounds to play through your TV’s speakers, but different ones, too.

While the FDS sound capabilities were mostly utilized for differing sound effects in the Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda, it’s impossible to not hear that sixth channel in the game’s title theme. Here’s the North American version of that famous track…

…and then the FDS, Japan-only one:

The North American one is clearly more chiptune-y, with that “classic” NES sound you think of, while the FDS version utilizes synth from the start, a sound that feels foreign if your ears are used to the cartridge-based game and its sounds. That wavetable synth allowed for plucked strings that sounded more clearly like plucked strings, for music that sounded more like it was coming from horns or flutes, and for that sound of bells that you hear at the 11-second mark in the FDS version, whereas in the NES one, “all” you get is the percussion kicking in at that time. Worth noting, too, that the existence of these bells in the Famicom version means that the 2011 symphony orchestra arrangement of this song included bells not because they decided it would be a good addition, but because they had been there for 25 years already!

They’re both great, but clearly different, and the FDS edition shows that the sound of the title screen in 16-bit SNES outing A Link to the Past was still a leap forward technologically speaking, but maybe not by as much as North Americans believed. After all, what separates that from the title screen of The Legend of Zelda? Plucked strings, synths representing horns, a variety of instrumentation that’s simply not in the NES edition… so, the same stuff that separates the NES and FDS editions of the original game in the series.

As stated before, the FDS capabilities were otherwise mostly deployed for the sound effects rather than in-game music, the differences in which you’ll be able to hear without a side-by-side comparison if you hit play on this video:

Sounds wrong to your NES-knowing ears, right? Whereas there’s a clear winner in sound quality for the title theme in my opinion — the fuller, richer FDS version — sound effects are a little bit more a preference for what you know. Which isn’t just me saying so: Clyde Mandelin, in the first Legends of Localization book that focuses on the localization differences in The Legend of Zelda, found as much while researching for it. (You might also know Clyde Mandelin from his own localization work, which includes Mother 3, but he also writes these excellent books on the subject.)

As said before, there just isn’t much music in the original The Legend of Zelda, but what’s there is excellent. Little of it has seen constant reuse throughout the series — there are far more nods through arrangements or modified leitmotifs or what have you to songs from A Link to the Past or Ocarina of Time, for instance — but that has nothing to do with the quality of the work. It’s more likely due to the looping nature of the music of the time period: while the Overworld theme had a clear intro portion, a middle, and some bits of instrumentation that made what you were about to hear different than the previous “loop” before it actually looped after 38 seconds, the Underworld theme just makes it to 19 seconds, and it lacks the kind of mid-loop changes that the Overworld theme does.

It’s still a great track in its own right, but the relative shortness of it gave it less room to build on. What it managed to make you feel in those 19-second loops, however, were feelings of emptiness and loneliness, which certainly fits the game world of The Legend of Zelda. Which is why instead of an arrangement to it or an explicit callback to it a la Zelda II’s overworld theme on the SNES in A Link to the Past, we got more of a vibes-based building upon. Here’s that Underworld theme from The Legend of Zelda, which is used in the game’s dungeons:

And here’s the Dark World dungeon theme from A Link to the Past:

The strings are new — it lacks the chiptune vibe of the NES given the SNES went in a different direction with its sound tech — but that same hopelessness and emptiness is there. It’s got a bit more urgency behind it, as well, which fits in with A Link to the Past’s whole deal: while you were encouraged by the game’s systems and inherent design to explore before anything else in the first game in the series, A Link to the Past is far more focused. There’s time for exploration and secrets, yes, but everything is tighter, faster, more focused on specific goals, so reflecting that in this game’s version of The Legend of Zelda’s own dungeon theme makes sense.

It also makes sense for it to be the Dark World dungeon theme that shares some commonalities with the original Underworld theme, as both were heard in the dungeons of, well, "dark" worlds. The world of the original Legend of Zelda isn't a dark mirror image like in Link to the Past, but it is sparse, dying, the power of Hyrule's ruling family reduced in the face of Ganon's strength, as he's not relegated to a "Dark World" but is instead within the "Light" one, dimming it. There's a reason that (1) Breath of the Wild feels like the technology-can't-stop-our-vision version of The Legend of Zelda and (2) that the original release was retroactively placed into the Zelda timeline in such a way that it justified the sparseness and drabness of the world, since it was within the one in which Ganon had succeeded in conquering the land and did not need to be in hiding, gathering strength away from the forces of Hyrule. Over time, the vibes of that world's dungeons, which give off those auras of hopelessness and emptiness, have only strengthened given everything else we know about where the game takes place.

Maybe my favorite piece of music from The Legend of Zelda is the theme for Death Mountain, where Ganon resides.

I love how low the bass goes in this, how dark it makes the track sound, and the music playing over it all is just as dark and foreboding, with the additional menace of keeping your attention on the difficulty of what you’re trying to accomplish in this labyrinth. The way Ganon’s own theme fits right into it when he appears is masterful, as well:

And that short, five-second ditty was arranged for when Phantom Ganon appears in The Wind Waker. And with good reason! (Because it’s great.) The best use of both of these themes, though, is through DSiWare title PiCTOBiTS, which arranged classic NES themes still using chiptune technology, just turned up in every way possible. Both Zelda tracks are great, but the second one, which focuses on punching up Death Mountain and Ganon with additional chiptune sounds, is phenomenal:

The Legend of Zelda might have had just a few minutes of music, looped over and over where it was deployed, but it was extremely effective for the places it was used, and some songs, like the Overworld theme, have become an integral part of video game music canon. The game released at a time after PSGs but before storage space was no longer an issue for songs, but it represents that time well in a way that, on the surface level, helps gloss over some of those very issues, giving certain parts of the soundtrack a feeling of timelessness. The overall quality of The Legend of Zelda helps with that, too, but the tradition of a strong soundtrack that reflects the gameplay itself began here along with the rest of the series.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.