Kenji Yamamoto
Notable scores: Metroid Prime trilogy, Advance Wars: Dual Strike, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!
The music on the original Prime is absolutely drowned in the sauce of awesome. Understated but constantly filling you with a sense of curiosity and slight dread; it captured the sense of exploring a hostile, barren world perfectly. Listen to the score from Tallon Overworld below if you want to give your ears some of that good aural lovin’.
Kō Ōtani
Notable scores: Shadow of the Colossus, Sky Odyssey
While his work outside of Team Ico’s enchanting adventure isn’t much to sing home about, we frankly couldn’t give a deep-fried shit. Colossus’ music is simply too good for the man not to warrant a mention. Equal parts haunting, exhilarating and mournful, each of the game’s titanic boss battles is given a wonderful sense of pacing by the context sensitve musi.. f*ck, we’re going wrong again, Just play the damn tune…
Koji Kondo
Notable scores: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Star Fox 64
What the Shigster is to Nintendo's legacy of incredible game design, Kondo is to the company's history of stupidly hummable tunes. Make no mistake: Koji is the absolutely daddy of game composers. He's scored nearly every megaton Nintendo game over the last two decades, including every proper Mario and Zelda title.
His work on the original Super Mario Bros. is still his most iconic. Created with the mantra of composing short melodies that could be repeated over and over again without getting boring, it's safe to say, as we sit here humming Mario's the main theme 25 years on, that he succeeded. Our personal favourite piece of his, though, has to be the Temple of Time theme from Ocarina. Seriously, when we hear that, we might as well be sat in front of a TV on Christmas Day 1998, passing on Xmas dinner and human contact to play the shit out of Link's landmark quest.
