Who composed the music for the original Metroid?

The composer of the original Metroid was Hirokazu Tanaka.

Tanaka wrote the music for Nintendo’s original Metroid, released in Japan in 1986. He was often credited by the nickname “Hip” Tanaka and worked within Nintendo’s R&D1-era development culture, contributing to the game’s distinctive audio identity.

Rather than filling the adventure with constant melodies, the soundtrack uses sparse, unsettling sounds and stretches of silence. That approach reinforces Samus’s isolation while exploring the hostile planet Zebes. The limited audio hardware of the Family Computer also shaped how Tanaka’s ideas could be expressed, turning atmosphere and repetition into important musical tools.

The original game is frequently confused with later Metroid entries. Super Metroid’s music was composed by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano, while the Prime games had different composers, including Kenji Yamamoto and other collaborators. Koji Kondo is strongly associated with major Nintendo series such as Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, but he did not compose the original Metroid score.