Grant Kirkhope: a Scottish trumpeter in Rare's Nintendo 64 years

Selected works

• GoldenEye 007 (with others)1997
• Banjo-Kazooie1998
• Donkey Kong 641999
• Banjo-Tooie2000
• Viva Piñata2006
• Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (with others)2022

The sound in a sentence

Bright, character-led tunes with prominent brass and woodwind, and themes rearranged for each area of a game world.

Edinburgh, the RNCM and a brass player's ear

Kirkhope was born in Edinburgh in 1962. He learned guitar from the age of eleven, largely self-taught, and trained classically as a trumpeter, studying at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. A brass player's instincts are often noted in his game music, where trumpets, tubas and clarinets frequently carry the main tune.

He joined Rare, then based in Twycross, Leicestershire, in October 1995. The studio already had a strong musical tradition through David Wise, who is profiled on his own page here, and Kirkhope arrived as the studio was moving onto the Nintendo 64.

Rare was then based at a converted manor farmhouse in Twycross, a village in rural Leicestershire, and had grown quickly on the back of its Nintendo partnership. The studio's musicians wrote for a small number of consoles at a time, which meant learning each machine's sound hardware in detail.

GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie and themes that change with the room

His first major credits came quickly. He contributed to GoldenEye 007 (1997) alongside other composers, and then wrote the score for Banjo-Kazooie (1998), a 3D platform game. Donkey Kong 64 (1999), Banjo-Tooie (2000) and Perfect Dark (2000, with others) followed.

Banjo-Kazooie is often cited for a specific technique. Each world has a main theme, and as the player moves between areas within that world, the game crossfades between different arrangements of the same melody, for example a version for underwater sections or a more muted one inside a building. The tune stays recognisable while its instrumentation follows the player. This is an early, widely discussed example of the approach explained on our adaptive music page.

Because the Nintendo 64 used cartridges, its music was still mostly sequenced and played back with stored instrument samples rather than streamed recordings. Our CD audio and the 90s page explains how that differed from disc-based consoles of the same period.

The technique also had a practical benefit: one melody, rearranged several times, used less memory than several completely different pieces.

Viva Piñata, the move to the US and freelance scores

Kirkhope stayed at Rare into the Xbox era, scoring Viva Piñata (2006). He left in 2008 to work freelance and moved to the United States, becoming a US citizen in 2017. Freelance credits since then include Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (2012), Yooka-Laylee (2017), a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie made by former Rare staff, on which he worked with David Wise and Steve Burke, and Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope (2022).

He has also scored films, and the score for The King's Daughter won the People's Vote at the World Soundtrack Awards in 2022. Alongside composing, he has voiced characters in games, notably Donkey Kong.

Yooka-Laylee was developed by Playtonic, a studio set up by former Rare staff, and the reunion of Kirkhope and Wise on its soundtrack was one reason it attracted attention from fans of the earlier games. His freelance career also shows a wider trend: composers who once worked inside a single studio now often move between publishers, films and independent projects.

An Ivor Novello for a turn-based Mario game

Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope was scored by Kirkhope together with Yoko Shimomura and Gareth Coker. The score won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Original Video Game Score in 2023. The Ivors are presented by The Ivors Academy, the UK's professional association for songwriters and composers, and introduced a video game category in 2010.

He has also received nominations from BAFTA, ASCAP and the International Film Music Critics Association over his career. Read more about the other two composers on that project on our pages for Yoko Shimomura and Gareth Coker.

Turn-based tactics games like Sparks of Hope involve long planning phases between bursts of action, so the music has to sit comfortably under thinking time as well as underline the moment an attack lands.