Nintendo is exploring ways to keep its worlds alive not just through new video games, but by expanding its intellectual property into every medium that can hum, glow and now spin at 33⅓ RPM.
The 136-year-old entertainment firm is issuing its first release of a video game soundtrack outside of its native Japan with vinyl sets of the music in “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild,” the groundbreaking adventure game that’s sold more than 34 million copies since its 2017 release. The announcement arrives one year after the launch of Nintendo Music, a smartphone streaming app for music from Nintendo games with some bespoke features.
The expansion is another signal that Nintendo, along with its competitors Sony and Microsoft, is looking to expand its multimedia business beyond the games themselves, as the video game market becomes more saturated and is prompting companies to look for new sources of revenue.
In past years, Nintendo would release CDs in the U.S. through promotional events or packaged with a game, like the soundtrack to the 2011 Zelda game “Skyward Sword.” Wednesday’s announcement marks the company dipping its toe in global distribution of its music.
“In Japan, they’ve got a pretty established soundtrack business that’s mostly CD-based. Japan remains still very physical media based when it comes to music,” Bill Trinen, Nintendo of America’s vice president of player and product experience, said in an interview. (It’s not just music: Japan has the highest-circulation print newspapers in the world, according to Press Gazette, a journalism trade publication.)
“There’s still a good ecosystem of stores selling physical soundtracks and music,” Trinen said. “There’s just a much broader recognition of video game music in Japan. As we’re looking at Nintendo and our intellectual property, one of the things we’ve really started to zero in on is there’s a lot more opportunity around music and we’ve got a broad music library.”
Through a partnership with Laced Records and releasing June 19 next year, the “Breath of the Wild” soundtrack will have multiple versions, revolving around two- and eight-LP record sets. The larger set, selling at $195, will segment its 130 tracks by mood and themes. The game’s calmer exploration music will stay on one record, with bombastic battle tracks relegated to another. The two-record set, at $50, will have a curated 34 tracks, like a greatest hits package.
Most video game publishers release music on Spotify and similar platforms. Nintendo, ever inclined to produce their own technology and content, opted out, instead pushing their online subscribers to the Nintendo Music app. The app features music across the company’s history, from the archetypal video game bops of Mario games to classic and niche portable titles like “Nintendogs.”
While Nintendo won’t share user metrics, Trinen said the app, developed by a “small team,” has seen steady growth in use over the year.
Part of the reason Nintendo opted out of using popular streaming services is that the company wanted to let users stretch playtime from five minutes up to an hour to re-create the dynamic, looping nature of video game music, alongside custom playlists. (The app even lets users block out spoilers from songs. Users can opt out of accidentally hearing, for example, the final battle track of a Zelda game.)
“With game music, it’s designed in a way to be interactive and for the music to be flexible and responds to the player’s own gameplay, so you have a lot of little interludes and bridges connecting pieces of music together,” Trinen said. “We want people to experience the music, but we also want people to still be connected back to the gameplay experience.”
Centering and selling the game experience is a philosophy held across the company’s various multimedia efforts, including the recently opened theme park Super Nintendo World in Orlando, the billion-dollar box-office “Super Mario Bros.” movie and the upcoming live-action Zelda movie.
Probably the biggest question for every Nintendo Music user: Where is the soundtrack for Mario Kart World? It’s the top-selling Switch 2 game (before the arrival of the recent Pokémon game), and boasts a popular soundtrack with live musicians covering Mario music over the decades.
“I can’t go into too much detail, but I can say that it does actually take time and work to prepare soundtracks for Nintendo Music,” Trinen said laughing. The game has more than 200 tracks. “And that soundtrack is particularly robust. It’s a matter of looking at the calendar and saying whether something might fit in or not. We’ve certainly heard that people are eager to see that on Nintendo Music.”
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