David Wise wanted to be a drummer who became a songwriter, “somebody like Phil Collins”. He was working in a music shop, demonstrating a Yamaha CX5 music computer, when two customers asked who had written the tunes it was playing. They were Tim and Chris Stamper, the founders of Rare. “I thought ‘yes, I’ve sold another one’, so I took them upstairs, started getting the finance papers out – and they offered me a job.” The music he went on to write for Rare had to fit into a few kilobytes and be finished in weeks. On the Super Nintendo, it became the soundtrack of Donkey Kong Country.
Fast facts
- With Rare: from 1985 until 2009, as a freelance musician at first and then on the staff.
- NES and Game Boy: Slalom, Wizards & Warriors, R.C. Pro-Am, Battletoads, Monster Max and many licensed games.
- Super Nintendo: most of the music for Donkey Kong Country (1994), with Eveline Fischer and Robin Beanland, and Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest (1995).
- Later Rare work: Diddy Kong Racing (1997), Star Fox Adventures (2002), the Game Boy Advance Donkey Kong Country 3 (2005).
- Freelance: Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (2014), Snake Pass and Yooka-Laylee (2017).
Hex codes and a doorbell
Wise had had piano lessons, played trumpet in a brass band and drums in a punk band, and had no other formal musical training. At the music shop he had been wiring synthesisers and drum machines together over MIDI. At Rare there was none of that. On his first game, Slalom, Rare’s first NES title, “I found out I would have to hand code HEX values for note pitches and note durations into sub-routines on a computer.” He called the NES “very much a glorified doorbell”: a few channels of plain tones and “a noise channel that wasn’t particularly glorious”. For sound effects he adapted a library that Rare’s lead programmer had built up.
The pace was fast. Rare wrote games for other publishers as well as Nintendo, and Wise remembered having one, two or, “if I was very, very lucky”, four weeks to write and produce a whole soundtrack. Eurogamer counted more than a dozen games in a single year. For Battletoads, he said, “Tim, the creative force at Rare, was very much into German Rock bands at the time.” Some of the music he wrote for Rare’s arcade Battletoads, on a board Chris Stamper had designed, was converted for the NES and Super Nintendo versions, he said. On the Game Boy, Retro Gamer singled out his “rockin’ guitar licks” in Monster Max (1994) as showing what the handheld’s four-channel sound chip could do. When Grant Kirkhope joined Rare later in the decade, it was Wise who showed him how music was written for the Game Boy.
Donkey Kong Country
Wise started on Donkey Kong Country while still freelance. He expected his tunes to be placeholders: “I understood how important the Donkey Kong license was to Nintendo, so assumed my work would eventually be replaced by a Japanese composer.” He was asked for three jungle demo tunes, which were joined together as “DK Swing”, “and they offered me a full time position at Rare”. Edge credited the music to Wise, Eveline Fischer and Robin Beanland; Wise later said that he wrote most of it, with Fischer as co-composer and Beanland contributing one track.
The Super Nintendo was, in his words, “like being given an orchestra”, but every sample had to fit into 64K of memory. Nintendo Magazine System reported in January 1995 that Wise had used a compression technique developed at Rare to get more out of that 64K. Wise explained his own method. He borrowed the idea of “Wave Sequencing” from the Korg Wavestation synthesiser, which built rich sounds by stringing together very short samples, many of them single cycles of a waveform. “Aquatic Ambience”, the underwater theme, was his first attempt, and his “first piece of music for Rare as a full time employee”. For Donkey Kong Country 2 he went further, sampling a Roland Juno-2 synthesiser at different filter settings and typing in the hex routines that put the waveforms back together. Cutting the ends off single-cycle waves to save memory, he found, added “subtle distortion and harmonics” that he liked. He said that “Stickerbush Symphony” from the sequel “really pushed the very limits of the sound chip on the SNES”.
After the Super Nintendo
On the Nintendo 64, Rare had more composers, and Wise’s share of the work fell. For Diddy Kong Racing (1997) he was “unashamedly paying tribute” to the music of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64; Retro Gamer later called its soundtrack some of “the best music on the N64”. Star Fox Adventures began as Dinosaur Planet for the Nintendo 64 and became a Star Fox game on the GameCube late in development, so the familiar themes went in near the end. After Microsoft bought Rare in 2002 he worked on handheld games, and on Xbox projects that were never released.
He left in 2009. “The reality was we had just too many composers for the titles we were producing,” he told Eurogamer. To The i Paper he described how Rare had grown from ten people to about 250 under Microsoft: “There was a lot of management.”
Freelance, he set up his own studio and wrote for the mobile adventure Sorcery! and the indie game Tengami. In 2014 he returned to the series with Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for Retro Studios: “being given the chance to work on a new DKC was like coming home”. In 2017 he scored Sumo Digital’s Snake Pass, using bamboo marimbas and shakers for its jungle setting, and worked with Kirkhope again on Yooka-Laylee, made by former Rare staff.
Sources
- Chris Greening, “Interview with David Wise”, Game Music Online (Square Enix Music Online), December 2010 (web, secondary): his musical background, the Yamaha CX5 and the Stampers, Slalom and hex coding, Battletoads, freelance work on Donkey Kong Country and the full-time job, the Wavestation technique, “Aquatic Ambience”, the Juno-2, “Stickerbush Symphony”, Diddy Kong Racing, Star Fox Adventures, the NES sound-effects library, leaving Rare. https://www.squareenixmusic.com/features/interviews/davidwise.shtml
- James Batchelor, “From Donkey Kong to Snake Pass: the music of David Wise”, Eurogamer, 9 April 2017 (web, secondary): Phil Collins, the shop and the job offer, the “glorified doorbell”, turnaround times, the 64K of sample memory, Tropical Freeze, too many composers, unreleased Xbox work, Sorcery!, Tengami, Snake Pass, Yooka-Laylee. https://www.eurogamer.net/from-slalom-to-snake-pass-the-musical-life-of-david-wise
- Mark Butler, “How I made the music for Nintendo’s golden age”, The i Paper, 26 October 2017 (web, secondary): typing in the NES music by hand, scores written in a week, the three demos for Donkey Kong Country, leaving Rare in 2009, Rare’s growth under Microsoft, Yooka-Laylee and Snake Pass. https://inews.co.uk/culture/gaming/david-wise-nintendo-rare-99134
- Nintendo Power issue 23, April 1991, p. 46: Rare’s first NES title, Slalom; Rare’s games for other publishers.
- Wikipedia, “David Wise (composer)” (web, secondary): release years of Star Fox Adventures and the Game Boy Advance Donkey Kong Country 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wise_(composer)
- Edge issue 15, December 1994, pp. 44–45: Donkey Kong Country credits (music and sound D. Wise, E. Fischer, R. Beanland).
- Nintendo Magazine System issue 28, January 1995: visit to Rare (Wise’s compression technique and the 64K for music and effects).
- Retro Gamer issue 33 (2006): Monster Max (music by Dave Wise).
- Retro Gamer issue 106, September 2012: Diddy Kong Racing (music by David Wise).