Rare Gamer Interviews Grant Kirkhope (July, 2010)

Rare Gamer: Today it is my distinct honor to introduce a very well-known face at Rare; his compositions are among the most recognizable and outright classic pieces in Rare history, spanning Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark and Viva Pinata. Today he continues his artistic genius to Big Huge Games where his legendary compositions will no doubt take gamers by storm.
Today I welcome, the, Grant Kirkhope.

Grant Kirkhope: Hello!

Rare Gamer: Hello again!

Grant Kirkhope: That’s quite an intro, are you lying?

Rare Gamer: No!

Grant Kirkhope: (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: I don’t know that guy! (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: Oh no? (Laughs) He’s fairly phenomenal.

Grant Kirkhope: (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: Alright, so, question one – Ok, I know this is going to be a really, really difficult question, but do you have a favorite tune that you composed while at Rare?

Grant Kirkhope: Um, I do actually. Um, It’s off the last Pinata game, and I think it’s called…
Ugh, the thing is, when they put the CD out, right, they change all the titles. I just called it Night 1, Night 2, Day 4, like that so, so I forget the title of it. But it’s on my website, under… it might be Bedtime Story.

Rare Gamer: Bedtime… yeah, Bedtime Story.

Grant Kirkhope: It starts with a bassoon going [Grant hums the opening bars of Bedtime Story]

Rare Gamer: Yeah!

Grant Kirkhope: That’s how it starts. That’s my favorite tune of all time, that I wrote. In fact, that was the last tune that we did in that Pinata recording session. And it was like the last day of recording and the orchestra played it absolutely beautifully, and the guy said to me, ‘Alright Grant, why don’t you go out and thank them’, and I thought ‘Oh my god’, so I had to walk out to thank them all, and I just burst into tears.

Rare Gamer: Ohh!

Grant Kirkhope: When I got to the podium, right next to the conductor guy, I just kind of went ‘Oh, I think you’re all wonderful’ and you know, kind of ran away, crying.
Yeah, that’s probably my best, my favorite piece of all time probably.

Rare Gamer: Oh, probably the best flattery too, I can imagine being in that orchestra and seeing you come up there…

Grant Kirkhope: Well, it’s just amazing, I mean it’s that experience, there’s nothing like it, it’s incredible.

Rare Gamer: And on the other side of the spectrum, is there a specific song that you just could not stand, whether it be constantly having to redo it, or you just hit like a writers block wall?

Grant Kirkhope: Um, honestly, not really. I’m pretty proud of must of the stuff I did at Rare. Um… Maybe apart from the Donkey Kong Rap. (Laughs)

Rare Gamer (Laughs) Little notorious is it?

Grant Kirkhope: I know, that everyone seems to hate. Um, but um, I mean I had fun doing it, I thought it was okay, I didn’t think it was supposed to be any kind of serious attempt at rap music. It was supposed to be a joke, but no-one took it that way unfortunately.
But, I mean I don’t think, really.
Nothing at Rare that I’ve done I don’t like. I like all of it, seriously.

Rare Gamer: Do you have any favorite bands or musicians you’re into?

Grant Kirkhope: Well, I’m a bit of a metaller really, so I do like a quite a lot of hair metal, over the years. So I guess… I was a big Judas Priest fan, I really liked Queensryche, I think Queensryche wrote some very dark music, I liked them better before Empire. Because its the right, kind of really dark music. But, you know, I like a lot of stuff really, I think.
I think I do definitely fall in the rock side of things as apposed to pop music, I mean I think Lady Gaga is fantastic. But I don’t think there’s too many pop acts that I like. I guess it’s because I’m an old fart now and I’m old, you know I’d probably like things that were younger, if I was younger.
But I do like a lot of metal, and I don’t listen to that much these days really, but I can certainly still listen to Queensryche and like it, and Judas Priest – I had a big [Iron] Maidan phase as well; a lot of the kind of British new wave metal bands that came up in the ’80’s, I was a big Bon Jovi fan as well, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Rare Gamer: Ah, that’s awesome.

Grant Kirkhope: Mmm.

Rare Gamer: Also, uh, we have to ask, as a professional inside the gaming industry, what was it like to see music as a whole evolve through like – you said you were using Cubase to create all of your music and stuff to going like, having orchestras at your fingertips?

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, that’s bizarre; I mean when I first got to Rare I was first put on Donkey Kong [Land] 2 on the Game Boy, I had to convert Dave Wise’s tunes to work on the Game Boy, and that was all done in hex. I don’t know if you know what hex is, but hex is like numbers on a black screen, and I just thought, ‘My god, I’ll have to quit, I just can’t do this.’ Dave showed me very quickly how to do it, and I just thought ‘This is just beyond me’ and I thought I’d have to quit and go home, literally. And on the second day I went back and he showed me again, and in the end I quite enjoyed that, but I supposed I’m used to using sort of, an actual synth, you would use Cubase to be a synth, to be a sequencer to use, you know, like that. But of course you have to take the instruments that you use, and make them very small to get them into the memory of the machine. So to get stuff into the N64, you had to make things very small, and have them compressed and the quality would be low kind of thing. So, all the stuff you hear on the N64 were samples that were used to make a midi orchestra kind of thing.
So, the N64 was quite a step ahead for its time, I thought it was quite good. Then we started work on the Gamecube and that was still going to be the same way, even though people by that point using CD soundtracks and stuff.
But Nintendo didn’t want to do that, so we were still going to end up using like a little midi orchestra, albeit better quality but still the same stuff.
Of course then Microsoft bought us and they went straight to the Xbox and we could use proper instruments then.
So I was using the Vienna Symphonic library which is quite a big orchestral library which is quite expensive to buy, and I used that for Grabbed by the Ghoulies.

Rare Gamer: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, on your site you stated that it was your last title at Rare and you felt you sort of come full circle. Was composing Nuts & Bolts something familiar, where you were like ‘Oh, Mumbo’s Mountain goes here…’ kind of comfortable, or did you feel like it was just a new, total thing altogether?

Grant Kirkhope: No I think it felt like an old piece and part of me, I think I was very conscious that I wanted to please all the fans of the game, to make sure that they had enough reference points to still link it to the past games. And so pretty early on we decided, well, I decided that it would be nice to include little clips of the earlier games in the music.
And one of the first tunes I wrote for it that did that was… umm… Nutty Acres, I think – because at the end of that… Is it Nutty Acres?… There’s a little clip of Treasure Trove Cove at the end of that.

Rare Gamer: Yeah, yeah there is.

Grant Kirkhope: That’s right, that piece! So that was the first time it worked really well and I thought ‘Ooh, I might try doing this some more’, so I just thought it was a great idea to kind of, you know, have a new tune and link in the old stuff too, so that was great!
Originally the plan was that because I was doing [Viva] Pinata 2 at the same time, I knew I wouldn’t get the time to do up the whole game – I really wanted to do all of Banjo in completely old music and old sound effects like I did in the past, but I just wasn’t going to get the time to do it.
So I had to give the sound effects to Martin Penny, and I was hoping to compose all the main themes for all the areas, and then Robin [Beanland] would be able to come along and he would take the main theme and write the challenge pieces and race pieces for the various bits in the levels.
And that’s how it sort of started off, and then he said, ‘Look, why don’t we just divide the levels up so I get a chance at it too?’ So, we just kind of did that; he took some levels and I took some levels.
But he used my tunes as well, so like, you know, he used the Stadium tune from Banjo-Tooie and stuff, but he did his own thing with it, which was great – it was good to get the help. And Dave Clynick also helped out with all of the spoof pieces at the beginning of the levels, that were like past theme tunes from other games.
Like I did the Dallas sort-of one, but he did the rest of those.

Rare Gamer: And [on] Dave, I read somewhere – I think it was on your MySpace; you ended up saying that you did the main Showdown Town theme but you had Dave do like, the Docks theme? So you kind of split it up?

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, I think I did the main Showdown Town theme, and I did the string quartet version of it, and it was Robin that did the rest. Robin did the rest of that, I think he did the Docks version and the Park version. I did the umm… Gameboy version at, is it L.O.G’s, whatever it’s called?

Rare Gamer: Yep, at the top.

Grant Kirkhope: I did that, and the very main theme, and the string quartet, I think that’s what I did for that one…
So it was really good to do it, and you know, when we got to BanjoLand I thought, ‘I’ve just got to try and fit in as many of the old Banjo pieces as I possibly can!’ (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: Awwe, that was great! (Laughs) Gotta say!

Grant Kirkhope: Well the plan was to try and have a channel fade going, so when you wandered into a new area, the tune would change to the new version of the tune. But because you can run around the level so quickly…

Rare Gamer: Ah yeah…

Grant Kirkhope: … There wouldn’t be enough time to channel fade to a new piece, so in the end I kind of stuck them all together and tried to get as many, you know, different ones as I could at one time – so that was great to do!

Rare Gamer: Wow. Also, do you have a favorite memory of working at Rare?

Grant Kirkhope: Umm, I have lots of memories at Rare, I mean, you know, Rare was a really really special place for me, and it absolutely broke my heart leaving that place. And I really just, I think the whole experience of being at Rare was just incredible, and at a glance, I mean getting there just after they did Donkey Kong 2 on the SNES — so they’d done Donkey Kong 1 and had a big success with that, and I just couldn’t believe it; I was actually there! I couldn’t believe I was actually writing music for a living, and I had been playing in bands from 22 to 33 really, in age. And I was on and off unemployment, and some were success, some were dreadful, and to actually get a job was just, you know, beyond my comprehension — I never thought I’d ever get a job!
Let alone writing music for a living, it was just incredible – and I knew Robin from years before so it was great to work with him, and just, I wouldn’t think there was any special memory at Rare.
Probably when Banjo-Kazooie first came out, I think we really thought we did something special there.
And we all kind of watched Mario come out on the 64, you know, and thought the game was fantastic and used that as our benchmark to try and make something comparable.
And that team was a really special bunch of people, and just you know, I think right place and the right time when everyone had the same sense of humor, everything from the way I did the sound effects to the way they wanted the humor to be, it just all gelled together greatly!

Rare Gamer: Yeah, well it’s the right people eh, when you get them altogether and collaborate.

Grant Kirkhope: Ah yeah! absolutely phenomenal, so I think my entire time at Rare, my entire 12 years was just the best time ever, really.

Rare Gamer: Heh, that’s awesome.

Grant Kirkhope: Mmm.

Rare Gamer: Onto the Dream stuff! At the start of the summer you released a large collection of Dream tunes to a grateful and ecstatic Banjo community. On your site you’ve said that you’ve ended up writing one hundred and seven tunes for Dream…

Grant Kirkhope: I did!

Rare Gamer: …Are you able to remember any of these tunes on your site, like, other than the ones you’ve posted?

Grant Kirkhope: Oh yeah, loads! There’s lots of tunes I can remember, I mean, just yeah, lots! It’s just the ones that I had, I was actually trying to impress Tim Stamper and Gregg Mayles at the time. So I was doing GoldenEye, and I got half-way through GoldenEye – no maybe a bit more than that – because Graeme Norgate started off and then went to do Blast Corps. and I got given GoldenEye to do when he was away and he came back to it.
And Tim, just marched in one day and sat on the floor, and Gregg sat in a chair and just said, ‘Can we hear your tunes, please?’
And I didn’t even know who they were at the time, I just thought, ‘Oh these are quite, you know, head guys at Rare.’ but I didn’t know who they were. And so I played my GoldenEye tunes and they said, ‘Oh yeah, quite good. Would you like to come and work on our game?’
And I knew Dream was going on, but Dave Wise was doing it at the time…

Rare Gamer: Ah yeah?

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, so he started it off, and then I had written some kind of… The tunes that were on my website, ones I had done using like, proper MIDI’s and proper synthesizers – not samples that I had created myself.
So they’re better quality, and I had quite a few of those tunes kicking around so I was able to just put them on my website in a reasonable state. While I have got the MIDI files for all of the Dream stuff, but it would mean me… it’s not impossible! But it would just mean I would have to go back and create some instrument sets, and just, it would take a bit of work, and because I’m so busy at the moment I don’t really have the time to do it.
But I do have all those MIDI files, but the one that I really want to have is one called ‘Blackeye’s Song’, which I’ve been talking about for quite a long time.
We thought it was a great idea to have a ‘proper’ song in the game…

Rare Gamer: Ah yeah, like a choir thing.

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, well, it was actually a proper song it was; Blackeye was a fat, drunken pirate who was the baddy in the game…

Rare Gamer: Yep.

Grant Kirkhope: And I wrote this tune and a guy called Leigh Ray, who worked at Rare sang it, and he had a good pirate accent, and Gregg and a few of the guys were the pirate chorus in the background. And we recorded it, it was in the game, it was really funny, I loved it! And I did record it, but I honestly cannot find the recording anywhere. And I think it’s on a DAT tape at Rare, Robin said he’d look for it for me, so I’m hoping that I do dig that up because I really did think that song was a really funny song to listen to.
It was kind of based in that sort of Monkey Island sort of funny, because we loved the Monkey Island games and I played those games over and over again because thought they were hilarious and I loved the humor and I loved the music and all that stuff, so we were trying to do that kind of thing.
So the Dream tunes that I had, I just thought, put them on my website.
But I thought it was quite nice for everyone to track back some of the tunes that I had used in Banjo later. So I thought the people would like appreciate them, sort of hear it and see how it is.
No I can remember lots of tunes from Dream, you know, at the time it was a big deal for Rare to try and do that!

Rare Gamer: Yeah, because that would have been the next ‘huge thing’, other than Banjo until it evolved into that.

Grant Kirkhope: Well yeah, I guess so, it started life on the SNES, so it wasn’t on the N64 first of all.

Rare Gamer: Is there any like, locations that you can remember that you composed for?

Grant Kirkhope: There was a beach. We had the beach scene at the start – we had a really good trailer for the game actually, that we sort of intro movie that we’d knocked together for Nintendo. And Blackeye was kind of, umm… big fat pirate farting on the beach…

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: There was a big treasure chest, and you saw the logo popped out, and the music all kind of matched it and it was a just a really great intro. And we did have that on an actual cartridge, and I’ve got a funny feeling, well… Tim Stamper did have that cartridge, whether he still has it, I don’t know. But that’s the only version of the game that probably exists, and he has that.
There was a big chase sequence, there was kind of a big mine cart sequence, you know, like Donkey Kong, like Indiana Jones…
Also, we were trying to use full speech in that game so we did quite a lot of voice acting for that game, because at the time not a lot of games did that, and the cartridge space was very limited.
So, the plan to use that Bulky Drive [Nintendo 64DD] that came out with the N64; the plan was to put the game on the Bulky Drive for extra space, so we’d have the extra memory. So that’s what we were trying to do with it all.
It was kind of the start of the Banjo humor; it was funny, we had lots of silly, quirky things that went on in the game, lots of bizarre characters…
One of the best characters I remember was a guy called, ‘Rear Admiral Brown-Eye’, which I’m sure you’ll find the intentions of that quite amusing. We founded that he always ‘takes a feat from behind’, that was his uh… (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: That was his kind of thing. So yeah, it was a big deal at the time, but we just couldn’t get it to run on the N64 fast enough. We had this really bizarre floor system where you could stretch the polygons into any kind of shape at all, and you could make really elaborate areas, but the N64 just couldn’t handle it!

Rare Gamer: Ah jeez!

Grant Kirkhope: And Conker [Twelve Tales] was started at the time, and Conker had a really good system and they were very much like Mario at the start, we were jealous of that game – it had started off so well. And then they hit a kind of design hitch and then Banjo started, and we kind of overtook them to get game out first. But Conker was a very different game to the game it ended up being in the end.

Rare Gamer: Mmm, yeah, definitely!

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah.

Rare Gamer: [They] took a real reverse there! (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: Ah yeah, yeah.. Dream would have been a good game, it would have been good. I’ve got very fond memories of that time.

Rare Gamer: Also, what was your favorite game series to compose for when you were at Rare?

Grant Kirkhope: That’s a tough one, I think uh… I’d probably say… Viva Pinata. Just because, I think if I were to compose by myself, and not be employed to do it, that’s the kind of music I’d probably choose to write. I really like that kind of gentle, English, pastoral feel. And I like writing big soppy tunes. (Laughs) I am a real old softie at heart.

Rare Gamer: This coming from a guy who loved metal, right? (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: I know! It’s very bizarre, I’ve got that kind of complete teaser, I like complete mad metal, or I just like this completely softie [Edward] Elgar or [John] Williams sort of sound. I just really like that sound, and I think it’s not very often that the two things will coincide in a game. And I always say that, ‘you need to write what’s right for the game, and not what’s right for you.’

Rare Gamer: Yeah!

Grant Kirkhope: And I do meet a lot of guys who want to write music in a certain style because they like that style and I often think that it doesn’t fit the game. I always try to make my stuff fit the game, you know. But I think Banjo started off quite different, because it did end up that Banjo was in Dream for a while, because we changed the changed the character from a little boy to a bear. Actually, I think at first it was a rabbit, at first, and then we changed it to Banjo to a bear.
And I’d written some music, there’s a bit that way, because it was more sort of RPG based; bigger tunes and stuff.
But when when it changed to Banjo, Tim said, ‘Look, it’s got to be more comedic, more platformy, more throwaway.’
So the first tune I actually wrote for Banjo was, I think the Spring version of Click Clock Wood – but then it wasn’t called that – I just wrote a tune off the top of my head that I thought might fit a game like this.
So that’s before I sort of got into that quirkiness that I got later in Banjo, that was more like a traditional sort of jolly, happy-go-lucky piece of music.
Where I think I got that more quirkiness in Mumbo’s Mountain and you know, Bubblegloop Swamp – those kind of stuff.
I got more into that quirky mode later, and writing that stuff at the time was great fun. I was just trying to write something I thought was a bit different – whether or not it was, I don’t know – but I felt Banjo was a bit different than other things that were out there. It was a bit more quirky, a bit more oddball, and that was really fun to find that style – but I really really enjoyed writing Viva Pinata, those two games.
Especially Viva Pinata 2, which sold very few copies but the ice part of Viva Pinata 2 is probably my favorite tune.

Rare Gamer: Icicle Chorus, you mean?

Grant Kirkhope: No the ice part, the icicle level in Viva Pinata 2 – that’s probably my favorite music – the icicle tunes, the ice tunes, yeah.

Rare Gamer Also, the new title you’re composing for, Project Mercury – we know it’s all hush-hush and you can’t say much about it, but how’s your experience working on it so far?

Grant Kirkhope: It’s been great! I mean, when I first went to work at Big Huge Games, I was hired as the Audio Director; I wasn’t hired to compose. They already had a contract with a company in Germany they called ‘Dynamedion’ or ‘Dyamedian’, I’m not quite sure how you pronounce it…

[Ed. Note: The German-based company is in fact called ‘Dynamedion’]

And they’ve done quite a lot games, and they’re a good company, a good bunch of guys – and I met with a head guy called Pierre Langer when I was there – and they were still going to be composing the music for the game, and I thought, ‘Fair enough, I wasn’t hired to do that so that’s their bag.’ But I did say, ‘Maybe I might do some themes?’, and they said, ‘Ah that’s great, we’re fine.’
So I thought about doing that, but never actually got around to it.
And then of course, obviously the company nearly got closed because THQ decided to sell us, and at that point all contracts were off. So just prior to that, the guys at Big Huge [Games] said, ‘It seems a bit daft having Grant sat here not composing when he could be composing, as well as doing sound design.’
On a purely mercenary basis it would save them one-hundred grand, or probably more. I mean, I’m sat there getting paid and I can do it for nothing really. So they said ‘Look, why don’t you do it?’, so I said ‘Well I’ll have a go and if you don’t like it you can keep going, but I’ll write some tunes [and] see what you think.’
So I was trying to come up with the overall, my job was to direct the overall sound of the whole game – in fact, it was two games at Big Huge at the time – and I was kind of the guy hired to give direction, to point in the right direction on how the audio, and the music should go in the game. So that’s my job, so I had to do that as well as my own work, so that’s how I started off there.

Rare Gamer: Also, you’ve got two young kids at home that you said were dancing to the end credits of the Viva Pinata TV Show. Have you told them that you like, created that song or?…

Grant Kirkhope: Oh, my kids love it, they really like it. I mean, they love the Spiral Mountain theme tune at the start of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts on the banjo when I played it. They really like that tune and Max loves it, and watching him play the XBLA‘s, it’s a really great experience that I can watch my son play and genuinely like it. Not because he thinks I did it, but just because he likes it full-stop. You know, I don’t think he cares that I did it or not, he just likes it. I just find it really fantastic, it’s just brilliant that I can say, ‘Yeah I wrote that tune, son’, you know, it’s quite nice! (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs) Back on the topic of Project Dream, a lot of fans have been listening intently to the tunes trying to find if they’ve been reincarnated in other games or anything like that. From what you’ve seen is there a tune that nobody has found yet, or you know, if there’s a Dream tune we haven’t heard yet that’s definitely been used?

Grant Kirkhope: That’s a tough one, I don’t know about that – I’ll think about it. I love it when people say, ‘That’s 1:36, that just sounds like this piece of music!’, you know? And it’s like, ‘Oh, does that have anything or something?’ You know, it’s quite bizarre really, quite funny like that.
Some of the boss pieces I did for Dream turned up later in Banjo and turned up in Donkey Kong 64 as well. There’s a tune called ‘Squid’ in Dream that turned up as one of the boss levels in Donkey Kong 64. But there’s definitely, definitely most of them in Dream that I’ve used again. (Laughs) I know that.

Rare Gamer: Has anyone surprised you with their findings on the Dream tunes where you’ve gone, ‘Oh, I didn’t think anyone would find that one?’ or?…

Grant Kirkhope: Umm… not really, not at the moment. I mean, people have spotted most of the stuff, most of the stuff is pretty obvious I think. But I can say that you do get people who do spot stuff that aren’t really there, or I don’t think it is, so you get guys saying, you know, ‘1:40 I can hear a piece of music from so-and-so’ and I don’t really spot it. But umm… no, it’s really good fun when people do stuff like that. You know, I’m very humbled that people took the time to even bother listening to it! (Laughs) You know, so it’s great.

Rare Gamer: I suppose it has that element of backmasking, doesn’t it? When people think they hear messages and, you know…

Grant Kirkhope: Absolutely! Yeah, yeah. Subliminal, you see!

Rare Gamer: Yeah, yeah. Back in a magazine, it was called Retro Gamer, Chris Sutherland from Rare said that originally Glitter Gulch Mine and Witchy World were planned for Banjo-Kazooie, but then were transfered to the sequel. Did it get as far as you composing these level tunes, or any beta tunes for that matter?

Grant Kirkhope: I think I’ve done the Mine… I think. Umm… I don’t recall Witchy World being in Banjo 1, I don’t remember that – I didn’t start that until Banjo-Tooie, but I definitely had the Mine tune. But also, there was like a lava level in Banjo-Kazooie which I started working on, but that got cut and it sort of ended up as Hailfire Peaks in Banjo-Tooie, but it wasn’t quite like that. It was different to that, it was more akin to the kind of Mario lava levels where they get the Indian tune – that level – it’s a bit more like that.

Rare Gamer:Mount Fire Eyes? Was that…?

Grant Kirkhope: It was… no, it was like… You know Hailfire Peaks in the second game?

Rare Gamer: Mmhm.

Grant Kirkhope: That’s what it sort of ended up as. But I think it started off as, yeah sorry, it started off as the traditional sort of lava level in the first game, it just didn’t make it. Back when Chris Peil [worked] at Rare, he drew it all out, but it didn’t make the game in the end.

Rare Gamer: Hmm… it’s kind of disappointing, eh, when something is cut like that…

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, I know. It just got tight at the end, the story of Banjo was that Banjo was supposed to be out when Diddy Kong Racing came out – that was Banjo‘s slot.
And I remember we all went to the E3 that year, and Howard Lincoln was one of the ‘head dudes’ at Nintendo sat us all down in a conference room and said, ‘You know guys,’ – he was a very softly spoken man, but he was feared for his… he could be a very nasty man. (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: And we all knew by that point there was no way that we were going to make Christmas; there was just no way we were going to do it, we were miles behind. And he goes, ‘Just to let you know guys, we’ve allocated this many million dollars to the advertising budget and we’re all locked in to Banjo-Kazooie coming out for Christmas.’ Well, aren’t we all? He said, you know, ‘Is that okay?’ and we’re all, ‘Oh yeah yeah Howard!’ ‘Yeah, no worries!’ ‘Yeah, of course it is’ , and in the end we just thought, ‘Shit, there’s no chance, what are we going to do?’ In fact one of the guys got so upset he wouldn’t come out that night, he just stayed in his room all night. (Laughs) But luckily, at the time they were doing a racing game, and it was supposed to be… I think it was R.C. Pro-Am?…

Rare Gamer: Yeah! Pro-Am 64, yeah!

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, I think it was going to be that and Nintendo said, ‘Look, if Banjo‘s going to make it, stick some Diddy Kong characters in that…’

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: You know, stick Donkey Kong in there, get it out and it’ll be great. So Diddy Kong Racing got all of our budget, all of our advertising, and they made an absolute fortune. So, lots and lots of games and all of the people on the team are like, ‘We need our money’. We were really depressed, like, ‘Oh God, they’ve got all of our money haven’t they now?’ And they were bigger than we were, so they got more money anyways.

Rare Gamer: Yeah, I’m glad how professional that was, ‘Here, just stick a few monkeys in there.’ (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: Well… (Laughs) I’m sure it was a bit more professional than that, but that was the gist of it. And so Banjo came out soon after that because we had to get the game to Nintendo, so some things got cut out of Banjo that we were planning, that just got put in the second game.

Rare Gamer: Do you have a favorite Dream tune when it comes to composition?

Grant Kirkhope: Umm… I do like the tune that ended up in Pinata.

[Grant proceeds to chant the first few notes of ‘Time Flies’ before he is joined a little too-enthusiastically by Lerako seconds later]

Yeah, that one yeah! The whole point of that song was it was supposed to sound a bit like ‘Peter and the Wolf’. Umm… I don’t know if you know that piece of music but it’s a clever kids story music, it’s quite a famous piece of music…

Rare Gamer: Picking… Picking the what?

Grant Kirkhope: It’s called ‘Peter and the Wolf’

Rare Gamer: Peter… Yeah! I know that.

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, so when we first started Dream, Tim Stamper said, ”I want it to be a big open garden, a big open world’, and we listened to ‘Peter and the Wolf’ quite a lot, and so that tune is kind of based on that. I thought that tune was going to be good, and I wanted to save it until I thought I could use it in something really good, so I saved it all that time until Pinata.
There’s a few tunes I did that to, sort of saved them, kept them back thinking, ‘I must save that for a game that I think is really going to fit.’ There’s a couple of tunes in Pinata like that, I must say. In fact, one of the tunes in Pinata I actually wrote for my wedding!

Rare Gamer: Oh wow!

Grant Kirkhope: I thought that when I got married, when you sign the register I’d write a piece of music that could play while we sign the register, so the guests wouldn’t get bored. (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: So I saved that piece right from Dream, got it in Pinata and prior to that it was in my wedding.

Rare Gamer: Oh wow, that’s awesome.

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah.

Rare Gamer: Yeah, Midnight Feasts, that was another one that made it into Viva Pinata.

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah… It’s just these titles. Justin Cook at Rare, he’s left Rare actually, after Viva Pinata, but he was head designer and when it came time to put out the CD, they asked him to make up names for it, so he was sitting there pulling his hair out trying to name the tunes. So I get mixed up when it comes to which tune is which because I can’t remember what they’re called, so…

Rare Gamer: That one was the Voyage one, and I think it was a night-time level and it’s like…

[Lerako chants the first few notes of Midnight Feasts, which he believes was featured previously as a tune called ‘Voyage’ from Dream]

… and you had that kind of, ‘tingly’… kind of thing like that?…

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah, alright, quite possibly, I’ll just have to hear it. (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs) Music is one of the things in games that does remain timeless; graphics get outdated, programming code is optimized, how do you feel that people do carry around your work on their iPods and stuff? You mentioned that on your site.

Grant Kirkhope: I really find that, honestly, and I’ve said it a million times, but I find that so humbling and I really mean that. I just think for any artist of any nature, be it, you know, pictures, or cameras or you name it – whatever you do as an artist, for anybody to appreciate your work is absolutely incredible. To have anybody… to have 10 people want to listen to my music is fantastic, let alone, you know, hundreds of people or whatever it is. I just can’t stress that enough, I just find that really humbling. It never ceases to amaze me, I get mails from people all the time saying, ‘I like Perfect Dark‘, or, ‘I like Banjo‘ or whatever, and I just find it absolutely amazing. I’m so lucky and so grateful to have been involved at Rare at that time, and just so lucky to have people like what I do – there’s nothing better than that, it’s incredible.

Rare Gamer: Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to add?

Grant Kirkhope: Umm… well, just thank you for taking the time to want to talk to me! Really, I mean honestly, I just find it peculiar that people want to… pay attention to me really! (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: You know, it’s really nice. I do love writing music, and I do love making the sound effects – I just love doing games altogether to death – it’s a great career, you know. I’ve been very lucky, especially since I spent a good 10 years of my life after leaving College and leaving University just doing nothing, playing in bands and doing nothing. To actually end up with a career that people have liked, I don’t know, I can pontificate endlessly how wonderful it is to be like that.
And I do find myself sometimes, honestly, I get sick of the job, I don’t want to do it anymore, and I just think, ‘Oh, you know, I’m sick and bored of doing this…’, and I’ll sit around for days doing nothing sometimes and get completely bored to tears. But then somebody will write me a nice email or something, and I just go, ‘I’m so lucky – how can I ever even think about this?’, I’ve got so many nice emails from people… People who have had some very nasty, personal things in their lives but my music has somehow helped them get over it. That is incredible to me, and I just find that amazing. I do moan about it all the time, and I’m sure anybody that knows me well will tell you that I’m pretty miserable most of the time. (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: And I do moan all the time about everything, everybody at Big Huge Games will sit to tell you that, and anybody at Rare will sit to tell you that as well. (Laughs) Especially the programmers, I just moan and moan and moan and moan until they did it for me, just to get rid of me. (Laughs)

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: So I think I do have genuine moments of being really down about the whole thing and not liking it and going, ‘Oh, I’m sick of this,’ you know?, ‘I need to do something else.’
But if I listen to any of the Pinata music – that music is completely, and I’ve said this somewhere else, but I could listen to that tunes all day. It’s almost like I wrote that music for myself, which is something that you really shouldn’t do in games, but I think it fit again so I was lucky. But that music contains all of the elements of music that I like; the chord sequences, the melody structure, the general orchestral layout – all of the things, it’s almost like writing music just for yourself that you like. It’s like writing your most favorite thing, and usually when you write music for yourself, it’s never as good when someone else sees and like it more than you do. You kind of… you don’t like it as much.

Rare Gamer: (Laughs)

Grant Kirkhope: Well it’s true! You never quite get that when you write your songs you just think, ‘Oh, it’s not that great, is it?’, but someone else might think its great. But I think with Pinata, I could listen to all of that music and really like it – especially the second game. And it’s not very often I think you can do that.
Actually, funny enough, I’ve been playing Banjo-Kazooie on XBLA the last few nights…

Rare Gamer: Oh, why?

Grant Kirkhope: Because my son got 60 Jiggies over the course that he had been playing it, and he accidentally wiped his profile, and he was absolutely heartbroken in tears…

Rare Gamer: Aww… I know that feeling!

Grant Kirkhope: I know! So I’ve promised him that I would get all of his Jiggies back for him while in England – so I’ve been sat here playing Banjo-Kazooie for the last few nights, cursing that it’s too hard and I can’t do it!

Rare Gamer: (Laughs) You MADE it, Grant! What are you doing?

Grant Kirkhope: I know! I know! I was doing Mr. Vile last night and I just could not get done Mr. Vile, it took me about an hour to beat Mr. Vile, and I’m just like cursing going, ‘Bloody game! I can’t bloody beat it for my son!’, you know, so I’ve got like 40 Jiggies back now, so I’ll try to get it back to 60 in a weeks time.
And I quite enjoyed listening to the music again, which is quite bizarre really, I mean, BubbleGloop Swamp isn’t a tune that I would listen to very much, but I listened to it last night and I quite like it, I think, ‘It’s quite good this’, makes me laugh, makes me smile. You know, I do have periods where I listen to my own stuff now and again, I’ll go back and listen to Perfect Dark and I do think, ‘I do like that, I’m quite pleased with it’, so I’m really just genuinely lucky to have people like… anything I’ve done, never mind all of it, just anything. Any tune, any minute of tune. I’m very fortunate, and it’s nice you guys want to talk to me as well.

Rare Gamer: Totally! Thanks for totally coming on the show, like it’s crazy you can talk directly to devs and stuff like that…

Grant Kirkhope: Oh, I’m very flattered you want to talk to me, I really am!

Rare Gamer: So your next [project], ‘Mercury’ is going to appear at Comic-Con?

Grant Kirkhope: Yeah! The game is going to be, I’ve just been doing the trailer actually, so I’ve had that recorded by orchestra in Prague again, and it sounds huge, I think. I’m very pleased with it, it’s come out, it’s very epic sort of trailer feed, it’s got a bit of the main theme in the game there. It’s very short, it’s on the 20th is it? I’m not sure of the date, it’s next week sometime. So Project Mercury should be unveiled then! I hope you like it!

Rare Gamer: Alright, cool! So there you have it guys, you can check out Grant next time at Comic-Con, check out the trailer for Project Mercury, and hear some good old Grant Kirkhope! Thanks for joining us Grant!

Grant Kirkhope: Thank you for talking to me, it’s been great fun!

Rare Gamer: (Laughs) Not a problem! Catch you later!

Grant Kirkhope: Catch you, bye!