The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time ditched the series' iconic overworld theme because composer Koji Kondo thought it'd "get boring and repetitive to hear the same melody all the time"

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"I've always kind of wanted to shake up the music a little bit"

Ocarina of Time
(Image credit: Nintendo)

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved video game soundtracks and The Legend of Zelda – and, of course, the various Zelda soundtracks. The Ocarina of Time is the fulcrum of my video game nostalgia centers, but as I got deeper into the series, I started to wonder: why isn't the original Zelda theme anywhere in the game? It turns out, the answer had been hidden in an untranslated Japanese magazine for decades.

"I've always kind of wanted to shake up the music a little bit in any case and because Ocarina of Time is a brand-new 3D game on the N64, I felt it necessary to change the music just a little bit from previous entries in the series," composer Koji Kondo said in a 1999 dev Q&A for 64 Dream magazine. "Additionally, Hyrule field is so vast that I thought it’d get boring and repetitive to hear the same melody all the time, so I decided to make a variety of music that would never get boring, with additional music and effects depending on Link’s status."

Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field theme is a banger, but there's a spirit of adventure and grandeur to the original overworld theme that can't be beat. I guess the sentiment from fans like me helped bring the track back immediately for Majora's Mask, but it always seemed like an odd fit for a game that was so offbeat and surreal. Ultimately, it seems we always could've blamed Kondo's desire to do something new – which, in hindsight, isn't such a bad impulse.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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