After years of asking, Nintendo has finally given us official access to some of its most iconic tunes thanks to Nintendo Music. And it’s great! Mostly. But there is one gaping missing feature that we can’t help but feel is a bit of an oversight on Nintendo’s part. Where are the composer credits?
We’re not the only ones to have noticed this musical omission, as highlighted by TheGamer. Many Nintendo Music users flocked to social media such as Twitter and Bluesky in the hours after the app’s launch to share their disappointment.
At launch, the new music app compiles over 2,000 tracks from 23 different games, yet none of them are attributed to a specific composer. This means that the likes of Koji Kondo, David Wise, Hirokazu “Chip” Tanaka, Kazumi Totaka and many, many other wonderful artists are missing out on a mention on their own work.
And it’s not as if the names are just missing from the track as it appears on your screen. Hitting ‘Track Information’ — where you’d expect to find, we don’t know, the person who made the song — only offers up the track name, its game and copyright information.
It doesn’t seem right, does it? Particularly when you’d think the potential to sort songs ‘By Composer’ would be a no-brainer. Heck, Nintendo is so secretive about this stuff, that it would be nice to know, officially, who’s behind each track from some of our favourite games.
We should point out that this isn’t a problem exclusive to Nintendo — one look at Apple Music shows that SEGA is the apparent composer of the Bayonetta 2 soundtrack when in truth nine different people contributed to that game’s music. And, according to Konami, the Castlevania Sound Team is responsible for a wealth of some of the best video game music of all time. No mention of Michiru Yamane, Yasuhiro Ichihashi, or Yuka Watanabe, to name a few people who have worked on that series.
Nintendo doesn’t even cite the music to a ‘Nintendo Sound Team’ or similar. Not that it would fix the problem, but it exaggerates what feels like a big oversight to not credit the people who have actually worked on the games’ music.
Nintendo has slipped up in this category in a number of ways in recent years; we’ve seen original dev teams miss out on remaster credits, entire studios get shrouded in mystery until a game’s launch and even a Nintendo Museum that’s apparently not too deep on the whole ‘history’ side of things. Not crediting the creatives in a music app shouldn’t be all that surprising, but it is.
Look, Nintendo Music is still new. We already know that more tracks are on the way in future updates, and given the number of people who seem disappointed by the lack of composer credits, there’s every chance that Nintendo will add them down the line. That said, it really feels like something that should have been in there at launch.
Come on, Nintendo, do the right thing… please.