For many years, in simpler times, the alarm tone on my phone was the Great Fairy Fountain music, specifically the arrangement from Ocarina Of Time. That magical theme, somehow comforting and heartbreaking simultaneously, has from its first appearance in A Link To The Past grown to exist in many forms and elaborate orchestrations. It was written by the great in-house Nintendo composer Koji Kondo, the maestro who scored the entirety of Ocarina and also created the Super Mario Bros theme.
Kondo is one of the greatest popular composers of the past few decades, and this autumn was inducted into the Hall Of Fame of the Academy Of Interactive Arts And Sciences. And yet you wouldn’t know about him at all if you played any of his music in the new Nintendo Music app, since it doesn’t credit composers. Very strange. It’s nice that the app knows which games you’ve played and lets you avoid musical spoilers for those you are intending to play, but isn’t the failure to credit the artists responsible for all this wonderful music bizarre?