The Greatest Game Music - Reviews of truly outstanding game music

Viva Piñata Soundtrack – Review

Viva Piñata Soundtrack, Grant Kirkhope, 2006

There was a time when Viva Piñata was touted as one of the fledgling XBox 360’s most important franchises, even accompanied by a tie-in television show. Ultimately, Viva Piñata didn’t go down in game history as anything close to a gamechanger or a classic like some of developer Rare’s previous titles. Still, the game’s colourful graphics and fairly novel gameplay – essentially it’s a first-person life and gardening simulation – left a positive enough impression with reviewers and gamers. In fact, the feedback was strong enough for Rare to release a sequel titled Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, giving the developers the opportunity to implement features they had to leave out of the first game due to time pressures.

The story of who ended up writing the music for Viva Piñata is somewhat typical for Rare games, in that composers ended up working on several projects at once, swapping scoring responsibilities in the process. Initially, Steve Burke was tasked with creating the Viva Piñata soundtrack, with veteran Grant Kirkhope doing sound design. Once Burke got busier with Kameo: Elements of Power though, Kirkhope was asked to take over the music for Viva Piñata as well. In the process, Kirkhope used material he had previously composed for the aborted Dream project on the Nintendo 64 (which later morphed into Banjo-Kazooie).

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Perfect Dark Soundtrack (Nintendo 64) – Review

Perfect Dark Soundtrack (Nintendo 64), David Clynick / Grant Kirkhope / Graeme Norgate, 2000

If you want to kick off a debate amongst seasoned console gamers, try “Is Perfect Dark better than GoldenEye 007?” According to reviewers, the answer is usually ‘yes’. After all, this is the game that gave Rare the opportunity to finetune their approach to developing a first-person shooter, after they had created a genre classic with GoldenEye 007. Arguably pushing the Nintendo 64 to its limits, Perfect Dark provided such a wealth of content and degree of polish that it was hard to see how a console shooter in 2000 could be any better. Then again, GoldenEye 007 had arguably been the more groundbreaking title, popularising console FPS games. As a result, Perfect Dark didn’t have quite the same impact, as it was ultimately an immense refinement rather than another quantum leap.

Naturally, for the Perfect Dark soundtrack, Rare would call upon the same talents that had created the music for GoldenEye 007 – easily the best score for any Bond game. Complications were afoot though. Initially, the task of writing the Perfect Dark score fell to Graeme Norgate, who was working on Jet Force Gemini at the same time. Norgate began to lay the groundwork for the music, choosing a palette of instruments and completing a number of compositions. However, mid-way through the three-year development process, Norgate and half of the development team left Rare to form Free Radical Design (best known for their TimeSplitters trilogy).

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GoldenEye 007 Soundtrack (Nintendo 64) – Review

GoldenEye 007 Soundtrack (Nintendo 64), Grant Kirkhope / Graeme Norgate, 1997

It’s no exaggeration to say that GoldenEye 007 was a game changer. By the mid-1990s, games based on movies had (justly) developed a disastrous reputation, and the fact that GoldenEye 007 was released a full 18 months after the movie didn’t help matters. And of course, this was a first-person shooter designed for a console, rather than for a PC – back then the natural home for FPS titles. But in the end, none of this mattered. GoldenEye 007 went on to sell more than eight million copies, becoming one of the most successful games of its console generation. Its reception among reviewers was just as enthusiastic and there’s no doubt GoldenEye 007 has left a lasting legacy – who could forget its legendary multiplayer mode? Not bad for a title developed by an inexperienced team that spent a full three years completing the game.

Like the game as a whole, creating the GoldenEye 007 soundtrack was no easy feat – after all, this was one of Rare’s first Nintendo 64 titles. Initially, Graeme Norgate was tasked with writing the score, having previously worked on Rare’s Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Land. However, Norgate was also working on Blast Corps at the same time and it became obvious that additional resources were needed. Thus Grant Kirkhope – while still working on Donkey Kong Land 2 – was drafted to join Norgate on GoldenEye 007 (he left before completion of that project to work on Dream). The challenge for both composers was to write music for a console that for the first one and a half years of the game’s development didn’t exist yet.

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Donkey Kong Land 2 Soundtrack – Review

Donkey Kong Land 2 Soundtrack, Grant Kirkhope / David Wise, 1996

When Donkey Kong Country was released on the SNES in 1994, it was hailed as a technical marvel that very few people would have expected to see on the ageing hardware. When Rare released a Game Boy port called Donkey Kong Land a year later, jaws hit the floor again. How could those Silicon Graphics workstations-rendered 3D sprites possibly translate to the monochrome Game Boy display? Turns out it was possible to bring those pre-rendered graphics to the 4-bit platform – although the result was visually overly busy and impacted gameplay.

One year later, Rare released Donkey Kong Land 2 – the Game Boy port of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. This time, the developers had figured out how to keep the visuals less cluttered and the game more playable. True, reviewers pointed out the lack of original content – DKL2 was more or less a straight port of DKC2. However, the SNES original’s outstanding gameplay qualities made the Game Boy version one of the system’s best platformers.

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Phantom 2040 Soundtrack (Sega Genesis) – Review

Phantom 2040 Soundtrack (Sega Genesis), Matt Scott / Burke Trieschmann, 1995

Phantom 2040 probably never stood a chance. Firstly, it was released towards the end of the 16-bit era on SNES and Sega Genesis. Secondly, it was based on the TV series spin-off of a comic book licence that wasn’t hugely popular at that time to begin with. It was no surprise then that Phantom 2040 was largely ignored by gamers – but it did find some traction amongst contemporary reviewers. And over the years, the game’s reputation only seems to have grown. With its ambitiously non-linear, Metroidvania-style level design, Phantom 2040 has now widely come to be regarded as a forgotten gem of the SNES and Genesis game libraries.

Just as outstanding as the game itself is the Phantom 2040 soundtrack – although that only applies to the Genesis version. This is where things get a bit murky as to who was responsible for what. Matt Scott and Burke Trieschmann are credited for the music and sound effects of the SNES and Genesis ports of the game. However, the two soundtracks could hardly be any more different from each other. Where the Genesis score impresses with its white-knuckle intensity, the SNES music is consistently dull, with average sample quality and none of the Genesis version’s energy.

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