To do this, Wise made use of the SNES SPC700 chip, manipulating the audio to eventually achieve a sound similar to the Korg Wavestation synthesizer A synthesizer released in the early 1990s which made use of a method of creating a rolling, wave-like sequence of sounds. His earlier work featured a combination of synth and computer-generated drums and horn sections to create a jungle-meets-jazz rhythm, with an undeniably chiptune-heavy sound. To get around that problem at the time, we used a lot of small samples and made it very synthesized, so it seemed to be a fusion between the two types of sounds. For me I very much wanted it to be all 1940s big band jazz, but that simply wasn't possible for SNES.
"When we worked on the Super Nintendo, it was a case of working with the sound chip. However, recreating the sound of a particular decade is more difficult than it might seem thanks to how much the technology has evolved, says Wise.
"We really fleshed out the idea of where we wanted to go, and I think for Nintendo it's probably quite important for them to have the nostalgia aspect as well." "We had a meeting with Scott Peterson who's the audio manager there," he tells us.
#Donkey kong country soundtrack series
His eventual return to the DK series came through Retro Studios' Michael Kelbaugh, the president of the Nintendo subsidiary in Austin, Texas who Wise had been in contact with since his exit from Rare.ĭescribing the start of development for Tropical Freeze, Nottingham-based Wise was flown to the studio's Austin headquarters to meet Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto and discuss the angle for the then-upcoming game. There were many other opportunities to make adventure games." "They were going into the sports direction and Kinect. And it was evident by the time I left Rare that we probably weren't going to make games that were adventure games or the sort of games that I wanted to develop and probably many people wanted to play as well. "When Microsoft took it over they had a different direction they wanted to take Rare in. "Rare was made famous for making games like Donkey Kong Country and many other Nintendo games we were very proud of," Wise tells us. Wise left Rare following its takeover by Microsoft in 2009, a company-wide shift that resulted in a change in focus for the game studio. "I don't think it's physically possible."
"I'm not sure I could throw that amount of time on a project now," says Wise. However, where the original title featured 12 or 16 songs, Tropical Freeze includes roughly 100 individual tunes, he tells us. If we did it the old way we'd be on it five or six years."Īt the time of developing the original Donkey Kong Country the team at Rare was working between 12 to 16 hours, seven days a week - albeit "quite happily," Wise says. It took a lot of time and a lot of brain power, and to do it all again that way, I'm not sure it would be possible.
It was a lot of effort to get it to sound as good as it eventually ended up. "The old technology was hard," Wise tells us. The musician's return to his retro roots, after leaving the studio in 2009, just happens to coincide with some new sound technology. Had Nintendo's veteran composer David Wise made his musical return to the Donkey Kong series using the chiptune technology he established for the franchise in 1994, the score for Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze would have taken up to six years to finish.įortunately, times have changed since Wise made a name for himself in a two-decade-long career as the house composer for Rare, the British studio that first developed the Donkey Kong Country series for Nintendo.