Earlier this week, I woke up to a delightful surprise: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker soundtrack has been added to Nintendo Music. Wind Waker is one of the seminal games of my youth. Playing through it with friends was the main event at Nintendo Fest — the name for my birthday one year in middle school, which was not a festival in any way; we just pulled an all-nighter and played GameCube.
That long night of gaming, and others like it, instilled in me a deep love of playing single-player games with friends, the kind of pass-the-controller sessions that turn story-driven campaigns into memorable multiplayer experiences. When I hear Wind Waker’s OST, I think about playing a special game with special people.
I’m listening to the Wind Waker soundtrack as I write this, and Dragon Roost Island — an all-time bop — just came on.
Putting The Play In Playlist
What Nintendo is doing with its recently released music app is a kind of artificial scarcity. It could have waited to launch the streaming platform until it had every first-party Nintendo game soundtrack ready to go — or at least a lot more than the skeleton crew it started with. But if everything had been available from the beginning, users likely would have gotten tired of the app within days.
Nintendo Music works fine, but it is slightly irritating to need to use a separate music player instead of Spotify or Apple Music. I make a playlist of all the new songs I listen to each year so now I need to maintain playlists on two services instead of one. Like I said, not a big deal, but a mild inconvenience.
So, if all the music was there from the start, you’d listen to your favorite game soundtracks, maybe check out some off the beaten path stuff, and then go back to using your normal music app. Who wants to use both?
Thankfully, cost probably won’t enter into the equation for every user since Nintendo Music is free if you have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription.
Waiting For Your Favorites Is As Fun As Listening To Them
But because Nintendo is parceling new music out week after week, there’s always a reason to check back in. I was disappointed at how small the selection was when Nintendo Music first launched. It had a few games that I loved, but many more glaring omissions. As I write this, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess aren’t available, so forget about less popular Zeldas like Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks. Super Mario Sunshine isn’t available, either.
There’s a surprisingly robust selection of Donkey Kong tracks — all three SNES DKC games — but no Pokémon soundtracks pre-Scarlet and Violet. F-Zero, Star Fox, and Fire Emblem are each only represented with one OST. Similarly, the only Animal Crossing and Pikmin soundtracks come from the most recent games. It’s a bizarre, piecemeal selection.
So many of Nintendo’s iconic games being unavailable makes the act of using Nintendo Music feel a little like being at a concert for a band you love and anxiously waiting for them to play their biggest hit. You’re enjoying yourself, but you can’t wait to hear that one song you really, really love.
Or, to mix metaphors, it’s like how a horror movie is scarier when it doesn’t show you the monster. You begin to imprint your own fears on the shape lurking in the shadows, molding it to match your own nightmares. Nintendo Music’s lack of options is like being really scared at a concert.
In that way, Nintendo Music is a microcosm of what makes it so fun and frustrating to follow the games industry. In the same way that you get hyped up and hope that the next Halo is going to show up at Xbox’s Developer Direct or that Half-Life 3 will be the “one more thing” at The Game Awards, only to be disappointed when it doesn’t happen, using Nintendo Music is an invitation to imagine all the potential cool things that could show up.
Will Nintendo finally add a soundtrack from a game released after 2023? If so, could it be the outstanding Echoes of Wisdom OST? Will it happen next week? Who knows. But it’s only fitting that the first music streaming app exclusively created to showcase video game soundtracks would recreate in miniature the hype cycle that keeps the industry going.
Next
The Switch 2 Needs A Completely Different Strategy From The Switch
The failure of the Wii U set the Switch up for massive success. The Switch 2 can’t run that playbook.