Totaka’s Song is the creation of Kazumi Totaka, a Japanese composer who has worked as a sound designer for Nintendo for decades. The song naturally takes its name from him and appears in most games Totaka has worked on over the many years. In most cases, players discover Totaka’s Song when they wait at a certain point in the game, such as on a particular menu option, on a pause screen, or during normal gameplay in particular levels. As each instance of the song varies where it’s hidden, it’s consequently created a history of players hunting down each iteration across Totaka’s Nintendo games.
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Totaka’s Song Discovery And History
Totaka’s Song was first discovered on the spin-off Mario game Mario Paint released in 1992. Arguably the most well-known version of Totaka’s Song and often how most players are first introduced to the Easter egg, it’s an easy version to find. Among other famous gaming title screens, Mario Paint’s own title screen is well-known for letting its players interact with the various letters of the game’s title. Clicking the “O” in Mario transforms it into a bomb, which explodes, and after a short pause, Totaka’s Song will begin to play. At the time of its discovery, however, it was dubbed “Mario Paint song” instead.
Following this discovery, the song was then found in other Nintendo titles, such as in Yoshi’s Story on the Trial Mode stage select screen after waiting a few minutes or in Animal Crossing titles. It was the latter that clued Easter egg hunters in on the origin of the song, as in-game Totaka’s Song is heavily associated with Animal Crossing’s K.K. Slider. Realizing that K.K. Slider was based on Totaka, it was soon revealed that Totaka had likewise worked on Mario Paint and Yoshi’s Story, leading fans to scour his previous works and discover that nearly all of his games featured his signature tune.
Since then, games Totaka has worked on have all featured Totaka’s Song in one way or another. It was even revealed that the song predated Mario Paint, as an earlier version was discovered in 1990’s X for Nintendo’s Game Boy, found a full fifteen years after its original release. But while the earliest versions of this song were well-hidden secrets that required only the most patient and diligent of fans to find, more recent iterations have become much more pronounced and readily available, to a point where Nintendo seems to share in the niche legacy Totaka has forged.
Totaka’s Song In Future Games
The latest confirmed inclusion of Totaka’s Song was in Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020, keeping the tradition going for future Nintendo games that Totaka works on. Totaka himself is getting ever closer to the age of retirement, meaning that there’s a real possibility that Totaka’s Song may retire with him. However, fans have recognized more obvious efforts to add the song to Nintendo games, whether this involves recording Yoshi voice lines that hum Totaka’s Song as in Mario Kart 8 and Deluxe, hiding the song within music remixes, or just outright including it in Animal Crossing as “K.K.’s Song.”
It seems that Totaka’s Song has transitioned from a musical signature specific to the composer to a broad Nintendo hallmark that has secured itself in the canon of its many games. Even though Totaka might leave behind game development and music design one day, his legacy will live on as an homage, both to the man himself as much as it is a tribute to retro Nintendo games. Additionally, given that Totaka has worked on many more different Nintendo titles, many more versions of his song could exist, just waiting to be discovered after so many years to join an ever-growing list of past and future games.
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