Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D Was Originally Going To Have Updated Music

A new edition of “Iwata Asks” with original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time composer, Koji Kondo, and Mahito Yokota, who worked  on the Nintendo 3DS port, has some interesting details to offer about the game’s music, and its transition to the 3DS.

Notably, Yokota reveals that, initially, he created re-arranged, more up-to-date music tracks for Ocarina of Time 3D, until Kondo asked that Yokota and his team remain faithful to the original Nintendo 64 tracks.

Yokota then goes on to discuss some of the challenges associated with making the music in the Nintendo 3DS version sound the same as it did on the N64. In particular, he says, the change in hardware caused several tracks to sound different, and that the new tracks had to be adjusted to give off the same vibe as the original game.

He also reveals that the Hyrule Field theme posed its own unique challenge because the original N64 track was interactive, and would change in pace, depending on whether or not the player was battling an enemy, and the distance between them as well. “We made the music on Hyrule Field interactive, so we ended up allotting a lot more of the CPU to sound than we usually would,” Yokota elaborated.

Ocarina of Time 3D won’t have an orchestrated track, but Yokota worked on Super Mario Galaxy 2, which did. Wanting to create orchestrated music again, he included a single orchestrated track in Ocarina of Time 3D, but wouldn’t say which one it was.