David Wise: Rare's first musician and the sound of Donkey Kong Country

Selected works

• Wizards & Warriors1987
• Battletoads1991
• Donkey Kong Country (with Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer)1994
• Donkey Kong Country 21995
• Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (with Kenji Yamamoto)2014
• Snake Pass2017

The sound in a sentence

Layered, atmospheric pieces that blend environmental sounds with melody and percussion, alongside driving rock-influenced tracks for action games.

A synthesiser demo in a Leicestershire shop

Wise is from Coalville in Leicestershire. He learned the piano first and later the trumpet and drums. In 1985 he met Tim and Chris Stamper, the founders of Rare, while demonstrating a Yamaha CX5M, a home computer with built-in FM synthesis, and they offered him a job. He has said he had written and programmed the music for that demonstration himself.

He remained Rare's only musician until 1994. During that time the studio was producing games for the NES at speed, and his first composition was for the skiing game Slalom (1987). The Wizards & Warriors series followed between 1987 and 1992, and the Battletoads games between 1991 and 1993.

Those NES scores had to work within the console's five channels, which our sound chips and chiptune explainer describes channel by channel.

Donkey Kong Country and the Super Nintendo's sample chip

Donkey Kong Country was released on the Super Nintendo in 1994, with music by Wise, Robin Beanland and Eveline Fischer. Donkey Kong Country 2 (1995) was largely Wise's own score, and he wrote Donkey Kong Country 3 (1996) with Fischer.

The Super Nintendo played music through a separate sound processor with eight voices and 64 KB of dedicated audio memory. Every instrument had to be stored as a short, compressed sample within that small space. Wise's Donkey Kong Country music is noted for making that limited memory sound spacious: slow-moving pads, environmental sounds such as water and wind, and the console's built-in echo effect are used to create mood rather than just carry a tune. Our 16-bit era page puts that hardware in context.

He also worked on Diddy Kong Racing (1997) and, with Ben Cullum, on Star Fox Adventures (2002).

Fitting a whole score into 64 KB meant choosing every sample carefully and reusing sounds wherever possible.

Life after Rare: Tropical Freeze, Yooka-Laylee and Snake Pass

Wise left Rare in November 2009, saying the company had changed a great deal, and set up David Wise Sound Studio in December 2010. Freelance work has taken him back to the series he is best known for: he composed music for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (2014), developed by Retro Studios, alongside Kenji Yamamoto.

In 2017 he contributed to Yooka-Laylee with Grant Kirkhope and Steve Burke, reuniting several former Rare musicians, and scored Snake Pass, a puzzle-platform game from the British studio Sumo Digital. For more on his former Rare colleague, see our Grant Kirkhope profile.

Snake Pass, in which the player controls a snake climbing through puzzle environments, was made by Sumo Digital in Sheffield, so it continued his long association with British developers.

What the Rare years show about British game music

Wise's career covers almost the whole arc of British console development, from cartridges with a handful of sound channels to modern projects with recorded orchestras and large teams. For most of his first decade at Rare he was writing, programming and implementing the music himself, which was normal at the time: the composer often had to understand the sound driver as well as the score.

His work is also a reminder of how much of the music people associate with Nintendo consoles was written in the UK. Rare's games of the 1980s and 1990s were developed in Leicestershire, and the composers who worked there, including Wise, Eveline Fischer, Robin Beanland and Grant Kirkhope, went on to influence later British and international game music.

For the wider story of the period, read our 8-bit era and 16-bit era pages, which explain how hardware limits shaped the way music for those consoles was written.