Rare Gamer Interviews Grant Kirkhope (Dream Discussion Excerpt)
Please Note: The following snippets of information regarding Dream have been taken from a larger interview with Grant Kirkhope conducted by Rare Gamer found here. All relevant Dream discussion has been preserved here within its own posting for easier accessibility.
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: 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: 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: 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)