Hirokazu Ando

History

Hirokazu Ando was born on March 2, 1969. His early influences included the classical pianist Claude Debussy, Ryuichi Sakamoto of the band Yellow Magic Orchestra, Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama, and Jun Ishikawa, who would later become his colleague at HAL Laboratory. He played bass, ukulele, and melodica, but not piano — a detail that says something about where his sense of melody came from. It was not the conservatory. It was smaller instruments, simpler tools, things you could hold.

In 1991, at twenty-two years old, Ando joined HAL Laboratory. The company was still small, known primarily for its work on the Kirby series, which had begun the year before with Kirby's Dream Land on the Game Boy. Two years later, in 1993, Ando composed the soundtrack for Kirby's Adventure, HAL's first Kirby game for the Famicom. His role was not to assist. He was the composer. At twenty-three, he wrote the music that would define the series for decades.

Among the tracks he composed was Green Greens, the melody that plays in the first stage of the game. He wrote it on a keyboard recorder — a small, handheld wind instrument children often learn in school. The melody is simple: bright, bouncing, innocent. It sounds like something a child might hum. That was not an accident. Kirby was designed for children, and Ando's music reflected that intention without condescension. It was not childish. It was childlike. There is a difference.

Green Greens became one of the most recognized melodies in gaming. It was not through marketing or orchestration. It was through repetition, association, and the feeling it carried. Every player who started Kirby's Adventure heard it. The melody became synonymous with Kirby himself — not the character's appearance, but his voice. The sound an entire world made.

In 1999, Ando was assigned to compose the music for the original Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64. The game was a crossover fighting game featuring characters from different Nintendo franchises — Mario, Link, Samus Aran, Pikachu, and others. Ando's task was to take the music of those franchises and arrange it for a single game. He handled all of the stage music, creating new arrangements of classic themes from Mario, Zelda, Metroid, and more. The work required both reverence and creativity — honoring the originals while making them fit a new context. The result was one of the most memorable soundtracks of the Nintendo 64 era.

Ando continued composing for Kirby and other HAL projects for the next two decades. In 2016, he was named lead sound composer of the Kirby series, a role that formalized what had been true since 1993: the sound of Kirby was, in large part, the sound of Hirokazu Ando. His music displayed classical, jazz, and symphonic influences, but the core remained the same — melodies that were simple enough to remember and rich enough to return to.

His career is a reminder that scale is not the same as reach. He did not compose symphonies for orchestras. He wrote a melody on a keyboard recorder. That melody outlasted most of what was released the same year. It is still being played, remixed, and remembered thirty years later. The tools were small. The reach was not.