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Any kid who owned a Nintendo 64 was probably familiar with the shiny golden logo of Rare, the British videogame studio that produced six of the Nintendo 64’s top 20 best-selling games.
Rare established a reputation for making games that were as fun to listen to as they were to play. Composer Grant Kirkhope has recently made the soundtracks for three of its most famous titles— Banjo-Kazooie , Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark —available to download for free.
Listen to “Click Clock Wood” from Banjo-Kazooie :
He’d spent his university years studying the trumpet at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and spent the ensuing decade playing in various U.K. rock bands like Little Angels. When Rare hired Kirkhope in 1995, it had already established itself as a maker of great videogames, and Nintendo had recently purchased a 49 percent share in the company.
“I was at the bottom of the ladder,” Kirkhope says. “I was the last one in.”
Kirkhope’s first job was to convert the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country 2, a Super Nintendo game, to the Game Boy. Soon after, fellow Rare composer Graeme Norgate asked him to take over work on the score for GoldenEye.
The entirety of GoldenEye ‘s soundtrack was memorable, but one of the most interesting pieces was the theme for the “Bunker” level. The song is filled with strange, echoing noises that lent incredible tension to Bond’s polygonal spy missions. The second half of the song adds a catchy, hip-hop style beat and a swelling theme that makes Kirkhope’s work fit perfectly into the Bond soundtrack lexicon while simultaneously sounding totally new.
Listen to “Bunker” from Goldeneye 007 :
Goldeneye went on to sell over 8 million copies and gross $250 million worldwide.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts for Xbox 360. Image: MicrosoftKirkhope’s next game with Rare would also turn out to be a classic. Banjo-Kazooie was Super Mario 64 with a sense of humor, bigger worlds and more style. The game’s score, composed entirely by Kirkhope, sounded like a street production of Looney Tunes themes performed by people with whatever instrument they could get their hands on. Banjos and kazoos were there, of course, but so were fiddles, xylophones, flutes and trombones.
Banjo ‘s main theme was so absurd and wonderful that other Rare staffers decided to make a music video to accompany it that would serve as the game’s introductory menu scene.
Writing music for the Nintendo 64, with the system’s extremely limited memory, was difficult, Kirkhope says. While CD-quality music is generally formatted at around 44.100hz, music and sound in Rare’s games in the mid-90s era often had to be sampled down to 16hz or even 8hz. Numerous sound files were reused in creative ways. Many characters in Banjo-Kazooie have voices which are distorted version of the Banjo character’s voice.
“I’m amazed that it sounds as good as it does now,” Kirkhope says. “The limitations at the time made it hard to get it to sound even half decent.”
Since being purchased by Microsoft, Rare has primarily created games for the Xbox 360. One of these, Viva Piñata, was an imaginative gardening game about raising a host of living piñatas. It was also Kirkhope’s first shot at composing for a full orchestra. Kirkhope’s score for Piñata evolved the same whimsical feel he’d developed for the Banjo games.
When Rare published a Banjo spin-off called Nuts & Bolts in 2008, Kirkhope once again got to work with a full orchestra. The score (which, along with the Viva Piñata soundtrack, is available for free on Spotify) is a triumphant revisiting of Kirkhope’s nutty old songs. The song that plays during the ultimate battle against Banjo nemesis Gruntilda, titled “The Final Fight,” is a beautiful, crystal clear film-quality piece that does justice to the vision of the original N64 game.
Listen to “Fight!” from Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning :
http://more-deals.info/images_blogs/gamelife/2013/05/Fight.mp3%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cp class="paywall">Kirkhope left Rare in 2008, but has continued focusing on game soundtracks. His epic score for 2012’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was well-reviewed, and Kirkhope has since gotten gigs scoring upcoming numerous games including Capcom’s remake of Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z . He’s also working alongside Canabalt composer Danny Baranowsky on the currently in-beta Desktop Dungeons.
Before Kirkhope released the Banjo and Perfect Dark soundtracks on Bandcamp at the end of April, he says that he’d occasionally receive letters from people begging for ways to listen to the music he created for Rare in those days. The last straw was seeing a physical copy of the Perfect Dark soundtrack go for $500 on eBay.
Kirkhope figured “people who want to get to it will get to it,” and threw the albums up for download. Within hours, they’d been downloaded over 15,000 times, temporarily making them the most popular albums on all of Bandcamp.[#iframe: https://more-deals.info/images_blogs/gamelife/2013/05/Grant-Kirkhope-Banjo-Kazooie-12-Click-Clock-Wood.mp3?_=1][#iframe: https://more-deals.info/images_blogs/gamelife/2013/05/GoldenEye_Bunker.ogg][#iframe: https://more-deals.info/images_blogs/gamelife/2013/05/Fight.ogg%5D%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E%3C/div%3E%3C/div%3E%3C/div%3E%3C/div%3E%3Cdiv class="GridWrapper-cAzTTK sjrqk grid grid-margins grid-items-2 PaywallInlineBarrierWithWrapperGrid-fyrGfS kLQIUk grid-layout--adrail narrow wide-adrail">
