Daily Debate: What Hans Zimmer Song Would You Add To Your Favorite Zelda Game?
Posted on October 17 2022 by Sean Gadus
Hans Zimmer is one of the greatest living composers in the world. His incredible scores and musical themes can be heard in film, television, and a few video games from across the past four decades. The German composer and musician has more than one hundred soundtracks and film scores to his name, and the sheer volume and variety in the composer’s work is astonishing. Zimmer has composed music for beloved animated films like The Lion King and Kung Fu Panda, epic period pieces like Gladiator and The Last Samurai, genre-defining films like The Dark Knight and Inception, along with science fiction epics like Interstellar and Dune. Zimmer is 65, and the prolific composers shows no signs of winding down his career any time soon.
With this in mind, what piece of music from a Hans Zimmer score would you add to your favorite Zelda game. For this Daily Debate, you can pick any piece of music from one of Zimmer’s many musical scores, and use it to represent a specific location or moment from a Zelda game.
Overall, this is an extremely fun exercise because Hans Zimmer has such a diverse catalog of music to choose from. My first choice would be to add either “He’s A Pirate” (co-written by y Klaus Badelt) or “Drink Up Me Hearties” from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise to The Wind Waker. The Nintendo GameCube title is the closest Nintendo has ever come to making a pirate-themed Zelda game, and I would love to sail the Great Sea to either of those tunes. One of Zimmer’s lesser known soundtracks is for the BBC Earth documentary Blue Planet II, and the best song on that soundtrack is the magical and uplifting “Surfing Dolphins”. For me, this would be the perfect song to use when the player is soaring through the sky in Skyward Sword. “Surfing Dolphins” captures the joy and wonder of free flowing movement, whether it is below the waves or far above them. Zimmer’s soundtrack for Interstellar is one of his greatest achievements, and one of the most interesting scores from the 2010s. The composer uses a variety of instruments (including a sublime organ) to create an otherworldly soundscape. A song like “Cornfield Chase” would fit very well in the cutscene where Princess Zelda tells Link the story of Hyrule’s creation by the Golden Goddesses in Ocarina of Time.
What do you think? What piece of music from a Hans Zimmer score would you add to your favorite Zelda game? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Sean Gadus is a Senior Editor at Zelda Dungeon. His first Zelda game was Ocarina of Time, and he loves all of the 3D Zelda games from 1998-2011. The final battle of Tears of the Kingdom is one of his favorite final battles in the entire series. He wants to help build a kinder, more compassionate world. You can check out his other written work at The-Artifice.com.
