Nintendo Publishes Making of Kirby Air Riders Music Interview Showcasing Internal Creators

Nintendo published "The Making of the Music of Kirby Air Riders — Part 1" on March 2, 2026, pairing a director-composer interview with a major Nintendo Music update that added the game's soundtrack to the service as a roughly three-hour collection of 114 tracks. The interview brings Masahiro Sakurai together with composers Noriyuki Iwadare and Shogo Sakai to explain the project’s musical choices and to list concrete track credits for each composer.

Sakurai frames the creative decision at the center of the piece, saying why he selected Iwadare and Sakai: "I think these two share some common traits. Firstly, they're proficient with orchestra music. They can compose their own sheet music. And they can conduct. They're good at uplifting and spirited orchestration." He explicitly rejected a stereotypical racing-game soundtrack path, adding, "You could say Kirby Air Riders is a racing game, so we could have gone with Eurobeat and fusion for the music. But from the start I wanted the music to be played by an orchestra. When I thought about how to give the music a wider range with that at the core, I knew these two would be the perfect fit."

Nintendo's profile pages for the three include short credit lines and a photo with captions that identify Sakurai in the middle, Noriyuki Iwadare on the right and Shogo Sakai on the left. The company lists Iwadare's contributions by name: Teaser; Starlit Journey (JP ver.); Starlit Journey: Ballad; Starlit Journey: Free; Airtopia Ruins; Crystalline Fissure; Steamgust Forge; Cyberion Highway; Skyah; and Skyah (alt). Sakai's credited tracks are Floria Fields; Waveflow Waters; Cavernous Corners; Mount Amberfalls; and Galactic Nova. Biographical notes on the page note Iwadare's work on the Grandia and LUNAR series and Sakai's credits on Kirby Air Ride and MOTHER 3.

The Nintendo Music app entry that went live the same day supplements the interview by making the works accessible: the soundtrack is presented as about three hours long across 114 tracks, with curated playlists for Air Ride, City Trial, Top Ride and Theme, and an Extended-Playback Collection for seamless looping of select tracks. The app, launched in October 2024, is available on iOS and Android and is free to Nintendo Switch Online members, expanding how internal creators’ work reaches listeners beyond the game itself.

Iwadare offers a short reflection on collaboration in the interview: "But thanks to that, we were able to play together." The piece is labeled Part 1, and Nintendo frames it as a retrospective that asks the three to "look back on the development period and share their stories," signaling more installments and further detail on the soundtrack's production will follow. For employees who worked on music, production and platform teams, the combined interview and app release give the developers’ creative intent and the commercial distribution of their work in a single, public push.