Kenta Nagata

History

They handed the new hire all of Mario Kart 64. Not a few tracks of it — the whole score. Kenta Nagata had joined the sound team at Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development division that same year, in 1996. “Mario Kart 64 was my first job as a new guy,” he said years later, sitting across from Satoru Iwata. He was born on July 7, 1970; he had learned piano and bass as a child and picked up guitar somewhere along the way; and none of that told him what a racing game was supposed to sound like. The Nintendo 64 was still new. So was he.

So he decided it himself. “I pay attention to the sound of the engines every time,” he told Iwata. “I also try to make sure the background music doesn’t simply sound like racing-game music. It’s like Mario’s blood runs through Mario Kart.” Iwata asked whether that was a tradition of the series, something handed down to him. Nagata answered: “Well, no one told me to, but…” He made that rule up in his first year at the company, and he was still working to it fifteen years later.

Four people were going to hear the same track on the same circuit for as long as the race lasted, and often for the whole evening. It had to loop without a seam, stay bright without turning shrill, and still give every course a face of its own. What came out was “Moo Moo Farm”, and “Bowser’s Castle”, and “Rainbow Road” — a farm, a fortress and a strip of light in the sky, written on retro synthesizers and rock organs. Mario Kart 64 went on to be one of the best-selling games on the Nintendo 64, and hardly anyone who played it can hear those tracks now without also seeing the corner they always spun out on.

Two years later they gave him a mountain. 1080° Snowboarding was directed by Masamichi Abe and Mitsuhiro Takano under producer Shigeru Miyamoto; work on it began around April or May of 1997 and it reached Japanese shops on February 28, 1998. The rule Nagata had made for himself started at the sound of an engine, and a snowboard does not have one. What he wrote instead was techno, drum and bass and jungle, with vocal samples over the top. It was an unusual thing to hear coming out of a Nintendo 64 in 1998. The soundtrack was released on CD that year, and it is the one people are still looking for.

On Animal Crossing he wrote the title theme and all twenty-four hourly variations of the field music, under the supervision of Kazumi Totaka. Those pieces play behind fishing, and talking to a neighbor, and moving a chair three inches to the left. They had to hold a mood for an hour at a time without ever asking for attention — and then be noticed, just for a moment, when the hour turned over.

In 2002 he was one of four composers on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, with Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi and Koji Kondo. The game was almost all ocean. Nagata wrote “The Great Sea”, the piece that plays while Link is between islands, and “Dragon Roost Island” — woodwinds and drums for a place of heat and stone where the Rito live. He also worked Koji Kondo's older Zelda melodies into the new score.

He was sound director for New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009), New Super Mario Bros. 2 (2012) and Mario Kart 8 (2014), which meant leading other composers and signing off on work he had not written himself. He came back as lead composer for Mario Kart 7 in 2011, writing the new courses and going back over the classic tracks — “Memory revision,” as he put it to Iwata.

Almost everything Nagata has written has to survive being heard again. A kart track loops until the race ends. An hour of field music loops until the hour does. The open water of The Wind Waker plays for as long as it takes to get somewhere. Music like that fails in a way most music never has to worry about — not by being bad on the first listen, but by becoming unbearable on the fortieth. Thirty years in, he is still writing music a person can hear a hundred times and still not want turned off.