Grant Kirkhope came to games from rock bands, and he did not get in at the first attempt. He sent Rare five tapes of his music before he heard anything back. Once inside, he learned to write music in hexadecimal numbers for the Game Boy, wrote most of the music for GoldenEye 007, and then got a game of his own, Banjo-Kazooie. “Banjo-Kazooie was the first game that I got completely to myself, so I had a lot to prove,” he told Retro Gamer in 2013. Its music changed its instruments as the player walked from one part of a level to another, so that the same tune followed you into a cave, under water or up into the sky.
Trumpet and guitar
Kirkhope trained as a classical trumpeter at the Royal Northern College of Music and taught himself the guitar from the age of eleven. Before games, he played in rock bands. He has described touring with the Little Angels as an opening act for much bigger names, and remembered being given a guitar by Eddie Van Halen backstage in Paris.
Rare
His first job at Rare was on the Game Boy’s Donkey Kong Land 2, where David Wise showed him how music was written for the handheld. “I’d never heard of hex, and I just thought it’d be all MIDI files, synths and samplers like I was used to,” he told the interviewer Chris Greening.
GoldenEye 007
Asked by Retro Gamer for the first title he composed, he named GoldenEye. Graeme Norgate had started the music, then handed it over because he was busy with Blast Corps, and Norgate taught Kirkhope how sound worked on the Nintendo 64 before leaving him to it. Kirkhope moved on to Banjo-Kazooie before the game was finished, and Norgate came back to complete it. For the music, Kirkhope said, “I listened to all the Bond theme songs as well as lots of the scores from the movies over and over,” and he fitted the main Bond motif into as many pieces as he could: “you only have to hear a couple of notes and you know it’s Bond.”
Banjo-Kazooie
Banjo-Kazooie (1998) was a bear with a bird in his backpack, and Kirkhope wrote its music to match the pair. Banjo and Kazooie were “totally opposite characters and I wanted to reflect that in the music”, he said, so he paired the key of C major with F sharp major, a tritone away, the furthest apart two keys can be on the circle of fifths. He liked to “compose myself into a corner and then try and get back to the home key in time to loop the tune”.
The game’s best-known trick was its music system. The game played its tunes as MIDI data on the console, not as recordings, so each instrument was a separate channel that could be turned up or down while the game ran. “The way it worked in Banjo was that a programmer would place a sphere over the area that I wanted a certain combination of channels to play in,” Kirkhope explained. With 16 channels to work with, a level’s tune could change its arrangement as the player moved, fading one set of instruments out and another in, and one channel was kept for a harp that played under water. Wireframe later counted Banjo-Kazooie among the first games to have this kind of dynamic music. Kirkhope admitted it was time-consuming, and pointed out that it worked because a cartridge made all its data available straight away.
Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64 and Viva Piñata
When Norgate left Rare to co-found Free Radical Design, Kirkhope took over Perfect Dark (2000). He aimed for “a mostly electronic soundtrack”, moody and dark with strong themes. In between came Donkey Kong 64 (1999) and its notorious “DK Rap”, which he has always disowned with a smile: “it wasn’t my fault honest! Blame George Andreas the game designer — it was all his idea.” It was meant as a joke, and Nintendo later reused it in Super Smash Bros.
On the Xbox 360 Kirkhope was Rare’s senior musician on Viva Piñata (2006), a game about keeping a garden of papier-mâché animals. Edge noted that every species had its own romance dance with its own theme tune, and that his scoring used “every instrument from violin to theremin”. He described the main score as largely symphonic, in the English pastoral tradition of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and recorded it with the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Hearing it played, he said, “brought me to tears.”
After Rare
His last Rare game was Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (2008). He had hoped to write all of it himself, but with Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise on his desk at the same time, “it became clear pretty soon that I wouldn’t be able to manage it.” After the recording sessions in Prague he left Rare for Big Huge Games in the United States, and moved there in 2008.
In America he scored Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (2012) and worked on Civilization: Beyond Earth (2014). He also wrote music for Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee (2017). For Ubisoft he scored Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle (2017) and its sequel, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, which won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Video Game Score in 2023. His Viva Piñata score was nominated for a BAFTA in 2007.
Sources
- Retro Gamer, issue 110 (January 2013), pp. 52–54, “The Music Men”: Kirkhope’s first composed title (GoldenEye 64) and his comment on Banjo-Kazooie.
- Wireframe, issue 8 (February 2019), p. 31: the five tapes, and Banjo-Kazooie among the first games with dynamic music by MIDI channel fading.
- Edge, issue 167 (October 2006): Viva Piñata preview (senior musician Grant Kirkhope; the dance themes and “every instrument from violin to theremin”).
- Hyper (Australia), issue 138 (April 2005): Perfect Dark, Grant Kirkhope, in a list of game soundtracks.
- Chris Greening, “Grant Kirkhope Interview: A Walk Down Memory Lane”, Video Game Music Online (web): Little Angels and Van Halen; Donkey Kong Land 2 and hex; GoldenEye and Graeme Norgate; the Banjo-Kazooie keys, spheres and channels; Perfect Dark; the DK Rap; Viva Piñata and Prague; Nuts & Bolts and leaving for Big Huge Games. https://www.vgmonline.net/grantkirkhopeinterview/
- Grant Kirkhope, official biography (web): Royal Northern College of Music; his game list; the Ivor Novello Award for Sparks of Hope (2023) and the BAFTA nomination for Viva Piñata (2007). https://www.grantkirkhope.com/bio/
- Wikipedia, “Grant Kirkhope” (web, secondary): birth date and place; joining Rare in October 1995; moving to the United States in 2008; the years of his later games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Kirkhope