The initial hype about Donkey Kong Country, which was released for the Super Nintendo 30 years ago this week, was centered on its impressive 3-D-ish graphics. But the game’s legacy proved to be its soundtrack.
As players led a brawny ape and a cartwheeling monkey through jungles, ancient ruins and snowscapes, they were treated to a musical smorgasbord of atmospheric tunes. The self-taught British composer David Wise, with valuable contributions from Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer, had managed to coax a richer variety of sounds than had ever emanated from a game console.
“Dave really knew the S.N.E.S. inside out, so he could push it as hard as he could to make it do things that people hadn’t heard before,” the video game composer Grant Kirkhope said. At the core of Wise’s music, though, is “melody, melody, melody.”
Wise joined the studio Rare in 1985 and composed for its games, including several entries in the Donkey Kong franchise, until 2009. He has continued to work in the industry, with his latest score accompanying Nikoderiko: The Magical World.
A legion of gamers cherishes the music for Donkey Kong Country and its sequel, which are a bit like the “Revolver” and “Sgt. Pepper” of video game music. In a recent interview, Wise unpacked the process and inspirations, musical and otherwise, behind his music for the first two Donkey Kong Country games.
‘DK Island Swing’
The music for Nintendo’s Super Mario games had a Latin and calypso influence that fits the hippity-hoppity gameplay as well as the sunny environs of the Mushroom Kingdom. The hulking hero of Donkey Kong Country suggested a different approach.
“Donkey Kong was a little more brutal,” Wise said. “Adorable, but quite useful in a fight if needed.”
For the first level of the game, partly because he was then learning to play saxophone, Wise sought to emulate the sound of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the raucous big band music from around the time of World War II. “DK Island Swing” has the propulsive energy of “In the Mood” or Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” complete with rollicking drums worthy of Gene Krupa.
That jaunty jazz is sandwiched between two sections that fuse tribal rhythms with ambient synth sounds, making it quickly clear that gamers were in for a wide-ranging musical adventure.
‘Aquatic Ambiance’
For fans of video game music, the serene, transporting “Aquatic Ambiance” has a special renown.
“I think a lot of gamers paused the water stage just to Zen out,” said David Lloyd, the founder of the video game music community OC ReMix. “It resonates on a melodic level, but also, especially at the time, on a ‘damn this sounds cool!’ level — that the Super Nintendo could handle it, technologically speaking.”
The limitations of the Super Nintendo sound chip pushed Wise toward certain musical effects. Over five painstaking weeks, he built the track up with shimmering looping patterns of notes, topping off the layered composition with harp glissandi, reverb-drenched piano and an aching melody worthy of a late-Pink Floyd guitar solo.
Wise was responding musically to the gorgeous lapis lazuli visuals of Donkey Kong Country’s water levels. But there was an additional inspiration that might explain why the music evokes such deep reservoirs of feeling: It started off as a breakup song. Although no one is really meant to hear them, all of Wise’s melodies have lyrics, he said.
“‘Aquatic Ambiance’ was inspired by a recently failed relationship,” Wise said. “As much as I’d wanted the relationship to work — I always felt as though I was drowning.”
At this point in the game’s development, Wise was not officially the composer; he figured that Koji Kondo, Nintendo’s go-to composer who worked on Super Mario and Legend of Zelda games, would take over. But Nintendo’s boss, Shigeru Miyamoto, apparently heard “DK Island Swing” and “Aquatic Ambiance” and gave Wise his blessing. “That set up my career,” he said.
‘Gangplank Galleon’
To accompany Donkey Kong Country’s end-of-world boss battles, Wise concocted a hectic rocker, “Bad Boss Boogie,” which unfurls in the devilish 29/8 time signature that Nine Inch Nails used the same year in “March of the Pigs.”
By contrast, “Gangplank Galleon,” which accompanies the game’s climactic pirate ship boss fight, begins in the frisky style of an accordion-led sea shanty. Wise had picked up two or three CDs of sea shanties, along with an album of barrel organ tunes, for inspiration.
But the jolly tone gives way to something fiercer and more appropriately epic: a galloping rhythm on the drums, insistent bass and scorching guitar notes. “It’s basically a sea shanty-meets-Iron Maiden,” Wise said. If the force of Wise’s version was constrained by the technology, it provided the blueprint for a plethora of face-melting heavy metal covers.
‘K. Rool Returns’
From the outset of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest — the sequel arrived a year after the first game — it was obvious the musical palette had expanded. The game’s title screen is accompanied by swashbuckling orchestral music that nods to, of all things, the state anthem of the Soviet Union. There is also a little bit of John Williams’s “Flight to Neverland” from the movie “Hook” thrown in.
To suit the sequel’s darker setting and ramped-up difficulty, Wise, the sole composer this time around, concocted a suite’s worth of musical pieces — including “Welcome to Crocodile Isle” and “Boss Bossanova” — inspired by Russian composers, with clear nods to Mussorgsky and Prokofiev.
“The main baddies in the game were Kremlings,” Wise said, pointing out a play on words that, it is safe to say, went over the head of most 10-year-olds. “It seemed entirely obvious that some Soviet-styled music might be a good fit. They just had a way of using the orchestra to evoke such emotional strength.”
‘Forest Interlude’
The soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country 2 featured Celtic musical influences, Hans Zimmer-esque action-movie bombast, ragtime, electronic dance music and Vangelis vibes.
A number of pieces showed off Wise’s facility with an FM radio-friendly pop-rock sound: “Hot Head Bop” had an irresistible bass lick, “Mining Melancholy” was driven by pickax percussion and “Bayou Boogie” borrowed — for the swamp level — the doom-laden opening drum pattern from Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” There were even a couple of bars of monkey hip-hop.
One of Wise’s most stunning compositions, “Forest Interlude,” began as an attempt to recreate the hypnotic synthesizer sounds of Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer.” The resulting lush and exotic soundscape, featuring plaintive pan flute and sprinkled with birdsong, turned out to be perfect for the game’s spooktastic forest levels.
But the most captivating track was a spiritual sequel to “Aquatic Ambiance.”
Wise said he had originally put the song together thinking it would be for another water level. Instead, “Stickerbush Symphony,” with its strangely melancholic New Age groove, accompanies a level in which the player navigates a fantastically cruel maze of spiky vines. “Now that level is hard,” Wise said. “This almost calming tune adds a nice juxtaposition to the gameplay.”
It also guaranteed the song extensive airplay, creating formative musical memories in the minds of a generation of gamers.
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