All The Legend of Zelda games are great (minus those couple that decidedly aren’t), but everybody has their game, the one that they either grew up playing, or the one they played the most, or even the one that just had the right mix of story, action, and puzzle solving. For me, my Zelda game of choice was 1992’s A Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo. It had gorgeous colors, the birth of now-standard game elements like the Master Sword and parallel dimensions, and a phenomenal 16-bit score by the legendary Koji Kondo.
Now, you can relive that amazing music in an updated form, thanks to a new analog synth album series called Switched On SNES (which we learned of via A.V. Club). Promising a series of these albums, Switched On is taking the music we loved from SNES games and reorchestrating them using updated and fuller electronic instrumentation. You can check out the whole (albeit very short) album below!
This music sounds enough like the original versions to make you nostalgic but has a more dynamic edge. These games had several different themes but there weren’t much to them (i.e. they repeated a TON), so they had to be good so you’d be okay with listening to them over and over and over. Kondo composed some of the very best of these in the Nintendo canon, so it’s extra nice to get to hear them in a reverent but different way.
My favorite track from the original game is the driving “Dark World” theme which, to me, always sounded like a locomotive going through a thunderstorm (I truly don’t know why). That theme in the Switched On version is the most different, but is still incredibly effective. The new version has a brassier, echoier sound that I really like.
Here’s the original for comparison:
The album can be purchased via Switched On’s Bandcamp page for $5, and the profits evidently go directly to Koji Kondo and Nintendo, since it’s their music to begin with. So that’s pretty nice. The group also plans to do other SNES staples, like Donkey Kong Country, Earthbound, and Secret of Mana.
What other SNES games would you like given this treatment? Let me know that, and your favorite Zelda music, in the comments below!
Images: Nintendo
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist and an unapologetic child of the ’90s. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
