Nintendo is famous for, among many other
things, its music. With legendary composers like Koji Kondo, the man who wrote the Mario theme,
and Kazumi Totaka - who KK Slider was based on - Nintendo’s games feature some legendary
music (pun intended). But these composers often like to hide little secrets, easter eggs,
and references inside the music they write, some of which aren’t discovered until years and
years later. And, so, I’ve spent the last week reading interviews with these composers, alongside
asking for help from you guys, the viewers, in order to dig up some of the most obscure
secrets I can find hidden in Nintendo’s music. And once you hear these easter eggs,
you’ll never be able to unhear them. The first game I want to talk about is Super Smash
Bros for the Wii U, which came out back in 2014. Now, this game features a huge amount of
music, as the Smash Bros games always do, and so to produce this huge volume of music, the
game’s director Masahiro Sakurai hand picked a group of over 20 composers to write new songs for
the game and to remix retro tracks too. And one of these many composers is named Akihiko Ishikawa,
though he usually goes by the alias LindaAI-CUE. I hope I’m saying that right. Now, one of the songs
that Ishikawa wrote for the game is the climactic battle theme that plays when the player faces
off against the game’s final boss, Master Core. As you can hear, the theme starts off as a fairly
dramatic sounding remix of the game’s main theme, but then part way through the song, everything
cuts out, save for one important tone. Morse code. That’s right, this theme actually
has morse code hidden inside it! Well, not really hidden - it’s pretty clear
if you’re paying attention. So what does the morse code translate to? Well,
it’s actually a little anticlimactic. It spells out the words “MASTER CORE”,
a.k.a the name of the boss. Not a super enlightening message perhaps, but I think
this is a pretty neat secret nonetheless. Now, Super Smash Bros isn’t the only Nintendo game
with morse code hidden inside it. Another infamous example of this is in the soundtrack to 2017’s
Zelda masterpiece, Breath of the Wild. The game had two lead composers, Manaka Kataoka and Yasuaki
Iwata. And if you don’t recognise their names, that’s not super surprising - both
composers are fairly new to Nintendo. I don’t think it’s a coincidence then that they
were picked to write the music for Breath of the Wild, a game which aimed to breathe fresh
life into the somewhat stale Zelda series. Now, it was Yasuaki Iwata who was in charge of
writing the music for the game’s divine beasts, the closest equivalents to the Zelda series’
dungeons. And in all four of these dungeon-like themes, you can hear something really
interesting that Yasuaki Iwata added. That’s right, it’s morse code again. As you
explore and solve puzzles inside of the game’s divine beasts, quiet morse code tones shift in
and out of the music. They’re not hard to notice when you know they’re there, but if you’re not
paying attention you would never identify those beeps as morse code - I know when I played
the game I was totally oblivious. Anyway, the message the morse code spells out this time
is something easier to recognise - SOS. A call for help. And that makes a lot of sense within
the game’s story - the hidden messages could be interpreted as coming from the four champions who
are trapped inside the divine beasts. Very clever. While we’re talking about Breath of
the Wild, there’s another interesting, potential reference hidden here. And, it’s
inside another song written by Yasuaki Iwata. As you journey across Hyrule, you’ll eventually
meet Sidon, a prince from Zora’s domain, which is a big, watery Kingdom.
Here’s what his theme sounds like. Now I’m gonna play Sidon’s Theme once more, but this time I want you to pay particular
attention to the piano line in the background. And then, I’m going to play you a
piece of music from a completely different Zelda game - The Wind Waker -
and this is the theme of The Great Sea. So, if you were paying close attention, you
might have noticed a remarkable similarity between the piano line from Sidon’s Theme, and
the strings from The Great Sea. This similarity was actually pointed out to me by a commenter
called Lassi. And at first, I’ll be honest, I was kind of dubious that this was an intentional
reference. Sure, the two instrumental lines sound very similar, but it’s not as though those
instrumental lines are actually super unique. But then, I started digging into interviews with
the game’s music team, where Breath of the Wild’s other key composer, Manaka Katoka explained “[Our
supervisor] made a rule that we shouldn’t rely on the cheap technique of re-using [existing
Zelda] music for easy fan-service points.” And so because of this, most of the game’s
musical references are really well hidden. That hiding of classic Zelda themes can be found
throughout the game’s soundtrack, from the Temple of Time to Kakariko Village. And I think this
may well be one more example of that. The fact that Sidon’s theme, the theme of the prince from
the ocean kingdom, bears a striking similarity to the music of the ocean itself - I think that
seems too convenient to be just a coincidence. This next secret is more well known, I think,
but it’s just so cool that I couldn’t bring myself to leave it out. So, the song we’re
talking about is from Nintendo’s GameCube console, but not from any actual game
on the system - it’s actually the music that plays on the GameCube’s home
screen, before you boot up any games. So, the composer of the song is unknown, but
it has a similar vibe to a lot of Nintendo’s operating system music, like the Wii’s home
screen, or the 3DS’s settings music. But the GameCube home theme in particular hides a really
interesting reference to a part of Nintendo’s history that isn’t super well remembered in a
lot of the world: the Famicom Disk System. The Famicom Disk System was a little add-on device
that you attached to the NES which allowed you to play games off of Discs rather than normal game
cartridges. It never made it outside of Japan, unfortunately, but the system had this short
jingle that would play when you booted it up. It’s a cute little jingle, but how
does that relate to the GameCube? Well, listen to what happens when you speed
up the GameCube’s home screen music by 19x. It’s the exact melody from the
Disk System! In the same key, too! Here’s the Disk System
theme again for comparison! I think it’s so cool that whoever created
the GameCube’s operating system music decided to reference this pretty obscure tune! Next, we’re moving on to talk
about a more recent easter egg. So, back in 2015 the game Super Mario
Maker was released, which allowed players to design their own custom Mario stages,
in the style of various retro Mario games. When creating levels, players could choose
which type of stage they wanted to create, ie. an underwater level, an overground
level, or an airship level. But of course, not every old Mario game contained all of those
level types, so Nintendo brought back the original composer of Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3
and Super Mario World, Koji Kondo, to write the hypothetical songs the games would have featured
back in the 1980s. And one of these fake-retro pieces of music is the Airship Theme of Super
Mario Bros. Here’s what Koji Kondo came up with. It’s pretty clever, you really can imagine
this music playing, had Super Mario Bros featured levels on board an airship. Now, 2
years later, Super Mario Odyssey was released, a brand new 3D Mario game with relatively
little in common with Super Mario Maker, at least on first glance. But listen to
the music from the game’s opening cutscene, which takes place on board a huge, flying airship. Did you hear? It actually features an orchestral
arrangement of Super Mario Bros’s hypothetical airship theme, which is very unexpected! Let’s
quickly compare the two themes once more. Nintendo’s modern Mario games often
reference Koji Kondo’s retro mario tunes, but it’s less common to see such a modern theme
of his incorporated into a game like Odyssey! Back to Breath of the Wild, which is swiftly
becoming the main topic of this video! This time we’re talking about a
song written by Manaka Kataoka for the game. Now, Breath of the Wild has a few
different musical themes that play while you explore the land of Hyrule. There’s the standard
“day” theme, a theme for exploring at night, and then, there’s one theme that plays in
extremely hot areas, like Death Mountain, called Scorching Heat on the game’s official soundtrack.
Now, take a listen to this one part of the song. So, if you’ve never played the original
Legend of Zelda game from 1986, then you might not have noticed the musical
reference here. If you have completed that game though, you’ll instantly recognise the melody
from the game’s final dungeon, Death Mountain. For comparison, here’s the Scorching Heat
theme from Breath of the Wild once more. As you can see, the melody is directly
lifted from Death Mountain’s original 1986 theme song, written by
the great composer Koji Kondo. So, there it is. There are some of the most
obscure musical secrets I could find from across all of Nintendo’s gaming catalogue,
particularly Breath of the Wild! I think it’s impressive that Nintendo’s composers are
able to hide such subtle references inside the music they write, and yet people still find
those references. That speaks to the strong melodies that Nintendo have used inside their
games’ soundtracks ever since the early 1980s! Hey, thanks for watching to the end! I do
have a few other interesting secrets that couldn’t fit into this video, so let me know
if you’d be interested in a sequel! And if you have any good examples that I didn’t
talk about, please please leave them in the comments below. I think this stuff is
so cool! Anyway, I’ll see you next week.
