Donkeykong underwater music code#
And while MIDI was becoming more widespread, allowing composers to automate things through their computer, Wise preferred to code his creations manually as it took up less memory. While the console offered audio teams eight monophonic channels to play with, these channels had to handle every sound effect and piece of music in the game. That's not to say the SNES era wasn't without its hardships. It was a really exciting time, working on the SNES." We'd always try to push technology as much as possible. "I always like a challenge, I always like to stretch myself - just like the graphics people did at Rare. We were eager to see what we could get out of that chip. It was like being given a whole new toy to play with - and then some. That artistic freedom, thinking about how we could make things sound, was very exciting. "It was still limited - we had to get every single sample into 64k of memory, which is tiny so that was a challenge, but it sounded a million times better. "The SNES by comparison was like being given an orchestra," he says. And as avidly as the composer embraced the challenge of working within such limits, he was relieved when Rare finally moved onto the the Super Nintendo. Wise is by no means exaggerating when he describes the NES hardware this way - the soundchip was actually used in doorbells. It's very empowering compared to that glorified doorbell." But I do prefer the freedom and the nice sounds we have to play with today. Then again, in some ways it was easier because you knew it would all be done quickly. With such limited resources, you had to very carefully choose how you were going to represent something. There was a lot of planning involved, trying to work out what we needed to do to make the best use of a tune. The job became about making things sound as nice as possible with the limited hardware we had - which is very difficult when you only have plinky, plonky sounds. "Three channels for music and a noise channel that wasn't particularly glorious. "The NES was very much a glorified doorbell," he recalls. The comparatively minuscule amount of memory and the primitive nature of the hardware made creating catchy tunes to complement the gameplay a major challenge.
Of course, pushing limits is something Wise rapidly became accustomed to during the NES era. It's a different system really - games are a lot more technically advanced, and we feel obliged to push the limits." People also expect a lot more from games. "It might be several years before a product is actually out, and there's normally quite a wait before things are done because their complexities are a lot more intricate. "It was a quick turnaround back then - nowadays we get much longer," he says. This alone, he says, shows how far the industry has come in terms of the role music plays in the medium. Just two years after joining Rare, Wise found himself with one, two or ("if I was very, very lucky") four weeks to compose and produce the entire soundtrack for a video game. As the company became more successful, the composer found himself working on more than a dozen games within a year, encompassing a mix of licensed titles like WWF Wrestlemania and Who Framed Roger Rabbit to classic Rare properties such as Cobra Triangle and the Battletoads games. Wise cut his teeth on 1987 winter sports game Slalom, the first title from the Stamper brothers' rebranded Rare studio and the first NES game to be developed outside Japan. I thought 'yes, I've sold another one', so I took them upstairs, started getting the finance papers out - and they offered me a job."
I'd written some of the stuff I was demonstrating, told them when they asked, Tim asked if I had an office. This was the early days of MIDI, and the CX5 let you connect keyboards to computers. Two guys came in one day - Tim and Chris Stamper - and I was demonstrating some a Yamaha CX5 music computer to them.
"On the way to that pursuit, I was working in a music shop. "Originally I wanted to be somebody like Phil Collins, someone who goes from being a drummer to writing songs and preferably being quite well known for it," he recalls. Hum just a few bars of 'Jungle Japes' wherever nostalgic gamers can be found and they'll be sure to know the tune note-for-note - not a bad legacy for a man who started out selling drums and keyboards.
Donkeykong underwater music series#
As a third of Rare's trio of ground-breaking composers, he was responsible for the tunes behind Battletoads, Wizards & Warriors, the RC Pro-Am series and countless licensed titles for the NES and Game Boy - plus, of course, the ever-popular earworms that form the Donkey Kong Country soundtracks. On the off-chance that you haven't heard of David Wise, you've almost certainly heard his music.
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