Today, we’ll take a look at melodies from classic NES gamepacks. The one below is written by Koji Kondo for The Legend of Zelda (1986).
This leitmotif plays anytime your Sprite finds a secret passage or acquires a secret item in the game. It consists of two tetrachords. Drag over them below.
The first tertachord (G F# D# A) is an incomplete chord, lacking any real identity. It can either belong to the G Harmonic Minor scale, or to a G Whole/Half scale. (This latter scale is found in the green keyboard with the rabbit at the top right of this website.) The second tetrachord is an E Augmented. An augmented chord is composed of Major Thirds – the happy interval that greets us when we walk into convenience stores. However, when you put two Major Thirds together, they make a very evil-sounding augmented chord.
A similar leitmotif is found in Wizards & Warriors (1988) by Dan Owsen. This melody plays whenever your Sprite enters a door. It’s reminiscent of a “Bill & Ted” handshake.
This riff is pure E Minor Pentatonic. Y’know, Jimi?
There ya go. Two secret mystik licks from when we were young. Now we can rock the shit out of them.
