In 1996, a young composer from Kyoto joined Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development division. Hajime Wakai was twenty-three years old. He had studied piano, flute, and saxophone from a young age, and he understood music as a conversation — how one instrument answers another, how silence makes the next note matter. He was hired to write music for video games. His first assignment was Star Fox 64.
The project was led by Koji Kondo, the man who had composed the music for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Kondo asked Wakai to compose all of the planet and battle themes. The game needed music that could carry the weight of a space opera while fitting inside a Nintendo 64 cartridge. Wakai drew on his experience writing symphonic music and delivered orchestral compositions that sounded like film scores — thematically rich, musically dense, despite the memory constraints. The music did not accompany the game. It gave the game a scale the visuals alone could not reach.
After Star Fox 64, Wakai worked on the Pokémon Stadium series. Then, in 2001, he was given something different: a garden-scale strategy game about tiny plant creatures. The game was called Pikmin. Wakai became its sole composer.
The music he wrote matched the world — intimate, curious, never grandiose. But the project required more than music. The Pikmin themselves, those small plant-like creatures led by a stranded astronaut, needed voices. They could not speak. They did not have language. But they needed to feel alive.
Wakai provided the voice himself. He recorded his own voice and processed it, pitching it up approximately 1.5 octaves. The result was a small, high-pitched hum — not speech, but something close to a feeling. Each type of Pikmin had a slightly different timbre. Red Pikmin sounded one way. Blue Pikmin another. The voices did not explain anything. They simply existed, the way a living thing exists without needing to justify itself. The voice work was not a side task. It was part of the same question the music had asked: how do you make something feel real when it cannot tell you what it is?
Pikmin was released on October 26, 2001 for the GameCube. The game sold modestly at first, but it stayed. People remembered it. Wakai returned to compose Pikmin 2 in 2004 alongside Kazumi Totaka. The series grew quietly, across decades, carried by the same delicate soundscape Wakai had built in the first game.
After Pikmin, his work expanded. He composed battle themes for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. He became a sound director — a role that required him to shape not just music but the entire sonic identity of a world. For The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and later Breath of the Wild, he oversaw everything: the music, the footsteps, the wind, the silence between notes.
Breath of the Wild, released in March 2017, made a choice that surprised players. In the vast open world of Hyrule, there was almost no music. Just the sound of wind, the cry of a distant animal, the crackle of a campfire. Wakai and the composers working under him — Manaka Kataoka among them — had made a deliberate decision. They explained later that because the world was so large and so open, continuous music would have pushed a certain feeling onto the player. They wanted players to hear the environment itself. A river's burble. A beast's growl. The silence that lets you notice those things. So they chose to step back. The music appeared in shrines, in combat, in towns — but in the field, the world spoke for itself.
Some players found it unsettling at first. A Zelda game without the familiar melodies playing as you walked. But the silence did something music could not. It made the world feel real. It made the player feel present, not watched over. When the music did arrive — a piano arpeggio in the distance, the swell of strings as you crested a hill — it meant something because it had been absent. Silence was not the absence of sound. It was a kind of composition.
Wakai's career spans nearly thirty years, from the Nintendo 64 era to the Switch. Star Fox 64, Pikmin, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom. Each project asked the same question in a different form: what does this world sound like, and how do we make the player believe it? The orchestral grandeur of Star Fox made a rail shooter feel like a war film. The chirps of Pikmin made a strategy game feel like tending a garden. The open air of Breath of the Wild made silence itself a form of truth. He remains active at Nintendo EPD Sound Group, still listening — to the worlds games are trying to build, to the creatures who cannot speak, to the silence that gives music its weight.
When you stand alone in a wide-open field, and there is no music, only wind — is that emptiness, or is something speaking to you that words cannot reach?