Any kid who owned a Nintendo 64 was probably familiar with the shiny golden logo of Rare, the British videogame studio that produced six of the Nintendo 64’s top 20 best-selling games.
Rare established a reputation for making games that were as fun to listen to as they were to play. Composer Grant Kirkhope has recently made the soundtracks for three of its most famous titles— Banjo-Kazooie , Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark —available to download for free.
Listen to “Click Clock Wood” from Banjo-Kazooie :
Kirkhope, 50, has a résumé that looks suspiciously like a list of the best games of the late 90s. The Edinburgh, Scotland native scored five of Rare’s N64 games, including megahits Goldeneye 007 and Donkey Kong 64.
He’d spent his university years studying the trumpet at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and spent the ensuing decade playing in various U.K. rock bands like Little Angels. When Rare hired Kirkhope in 1995, it had already established itself as a maker of great videogames, and Nintendo had recently purchased a 49 percent share in the company.
“I was at the bottom of the ladder,” Kirkhope says. “I was the last one in.”
Kirkhope’s first job was to convert the soundtrack for Donkey Kong Country 2, a Super Nintendo game, to the Game Boy. Soon after, fellow Rare composer Graeme Norgate asked him to take over work on the score for GoldenEye.
The entirety of GoldenEye ‘s soundtrack was memorable, but one of the most interesting pieces was the theme for the “Bunker” level. The song is filled with strange, echoing noises that lent incredible tension to Bond’s polygonal spy missions. The second half of the song adds a catchy, hip-hop style beat and a swelling theme that makes Kirkhope’s work fit perfectly into the Bond soundtrack lexicon while simultaneously sounding totally new.
Listen to “Bunker” from Goldeneye 007 :
There’s one particular sound in the Bunker song, a distant clang of some unidentifiable object against another, that Kirkhope says he’s been asked about repeatedly over the years.
Kirkhope says he discovered the noise while listening to the official soundtrack for the 1995 Goldeneye movie, by French composer Éric Serra. He describes it as sounding like a submarine sonar. Eventually, he imitated the sound using a simple Proteus FX synthesizer. “It was just a high symbol or a tambourine tuned right down,” Kirkhope says.