Toru Minegishi

History

Toru Minegishi was born in 1975 into a musical household. His parents listened to Latin music and tango at home, and the sounds stayed with him. At age ten he saw a television commercial for The Legend of Zelda. He asked his parents for the game. They agreed on a condition: improve your swimming school performance first. He did. They bought him a Family Computer Disk System with The Legend of Zelda. A year later he heard Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition for the first time — a suite of ten movements inspired by paintings, each piece answering a different image with sound. That structure, translating one medium into another, would shape the way he thought about composition.

Minegishi did not attend a music conservatory. He gained experience as a musician during his school and college years, playing and listening broadly. In 1999 he passed Nintendo's composition and music tests and joined Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development as a composer and sound effects designer. His debut project was Pokémon Stadium for the Nintendo 64. Early in his career he also worked on the GameCube startup sound — a short musical signature composed without instruments, built entirely from the constraints of the hardware.

One of his formative assignments came with Animal Crossing. The game featured a wandering musician named K.K. Slider — a dog who played guitar and took requests from players. Minegishi was tasked with writing more than fifty songs, each in a different genre. Jazz, bossa nova, salsa, rock, ballads, folk — genres he had not necessarily written in before. He later cited this project as one of his greatest learning experiences, not because it was easy but because it forced him to stretch across styles he had only listened to, never composed.

His first work on The Legend of Zelda series came with Majora's Mask, where he composed three battle themes. By the time The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess began development in the mid-2000s, he was assigned as the main composer. The score he wrote was noted for its melancholic tone and Eastern European influences — one of the largest soundtracks in the series' history at the time. Minegishi cited Alan Menken, whose music had influenced The Wind Waker's sound team, and composers like Maurice Ravel and Sting as inspirations. He also considered Koji Kondo, the manager of Nintendo's sound group, as a master whose work set the standard.

In 2015 Nintendo released Splatoon, a multiplayer game set in a world of anthropomorphic squids and octopuses. Minegishi served as sound director and lead composer. The game featured fictional in-universe bands — Squid Squad, Hightide Era, Turquoise October, Wet Floor — each with a distinct musical identity. Rather than composing a single soundtrack, Minegishi and his team built what felt like a music scene, as if these bands actually existed and had their own styles. He returned in the same role for Splatoon 2 and continued to compose for Splatoon 3. In interviews about the series, he discussed coordinating the sound team and establishing the musical voices of each fictional group, treating them as real artists rather than background elements.

Minegishi's career is a quiet argument that a composer's range is not something you are born with. It is built by accepting assignments you do not yet know how to complete — fifty genres for a dog with a guitar, a melancholy score for a fantasy kingdom, punk rock for squids who do not exist. The breadth comes from the willingness to try, not the certainty that you already can.