Koji Kondo · The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time · Nintendo 64 · 1998 · 82 tracks
Koji Kondo wrote a soundtrack that the player also performs: twelve melodies played on the controller's buttons that open doors, change the weather and bend time.
Music in most games accompanies the play. In Ocarina of Time it is part of the play. Koji Kondo, the composer behind most of the Zelda series, scored the game's regions, towns and dungeons, but its signature is the set of twelve melodies Link learns on the ocarina, which are used to solve music-based puzzles and to teleport to places already visited. The player performs them on the Nintendo 64 controller, whose button layout resembles the holes of the instrument: five notes are available, and tilting the analog stick bends the pitch for more. Because each song is short, distinct and tied to an action, players learned them by ear and by hand, and many can still play Zelda's Lullaby or Epona's Song years later. Critics noted another inversion: areas of Hyrule have their own musical pieces, so a melody learned in a place summons that place back — a kind of leitmotif in reverse. The game was released in Japan and North America in November 1998, and Pony Canyon published the official soundtrack in Japan on 18 December 1998, on a single CD with 82 tracks. One piece changed after launch. The original Fire Temple theme contained a sample of the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer; because Nintendo's policy excluded real religious references, later revisions of the game replaced it with a version that simply removed the sample.
Kondo's problem was to write melodies that worked both as music and as input. They had to be short enough to play from memory, distinct enough that no two could be confused, and built from only five notes. The solution — a handful of compact, strongly shaped phrases — made each song function like a spell with a sound, and gave the game a musical vocabulary that players carried around in their heads.
It also changed how the rest of the score was heard. Once a player had learned the Song of Storms or the Prelude of Light on the controller, hearing it in the world meant something: a place, an ability, a memory of learning it. That tie between hearing and doing is why Ocarina of Time's songs are remembered better than almost any other music of the N64 era.