In October 1995, Grant Kirkhope walked into Rare's studio in Twycross, a small village in the English countryside. He was thirty-three years old. For more than a decade, he had made his living as a trumpet player — touring arenas with Little Angels, opening for Van Halen and Bon Jovi, playing hundreds of nights a year. The band had a number one album in the UK. Then the bands split. The work dried up. He needed a job.
He was born in Edinburgh on July 10, 1962. When he was five, his family moved to England. He started playing trumpet at six. He studied classical trumpet at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, graduating in 1984 with a diploma. What followed was the ordinary career of a working musician: theatre pits, session work, touring bands. Not famous. Not starving. Somewhere in between.
Rare hired him to convert music from Donkey Kong Country 2 to the Game Boy version — technical work, not creative work. Then composer Graeme Norgate, who was busy with another project, asked if Kirkhope could help finish the music for GoldenEye 007. Kirkhope said yes. He had never composed for a game before. He did not know what the constraints were. He learned by doing.
The Nintendo 64 had 4MB of RAM. Every sound had to be recorded, compressed, and fit into a memory budget smaller than a single photograph today. Kirkhope recorded instrument samples himself — guitars, brass, percussion — and built each track from those fragments. There was no orchestra. There was no budget for live recording. There was a microphone, a keyboard, and a deadline.
Between 1995 and 2008, he composed the music for GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark, and Viva Piñata, among others. He provided voices for characters. He wrote a rap about monkeys that became one of the most argued-about pieces of video game music in history. He worked on multiple projects at once, switching between the bright, cartoonish melodies of Banjo and the darker, more subdued tones of Donkey Kong 64 on the same day.
In 2006, his score for Viva Piñata earned him a BAFTA nomination. On July 14, 2008, he resigned from Rare. The company had been bought by Microsoft, and the work had changed. He moved to the United States and became a freelance composer. He has since worked on Mario + Rabbids, Kingdoms of Amalur, and other projects. He has been nominated by BAFTA, ASCAP, and the IFMCA.
His career in orchestras and touring bands lasted about fifteen years. His career at Rare lasted thirteen. The first paid him to play what others had written. The second paid him to write what millions would hear. Neither career made him famous in the way fame is usually measured — his name does not appear on album covers or concert posters. But the music he wrote under memory constraints, in a small studio in the English countryside, is still played today.
When Kirkhope left the Royal Northern College of Music in 1984, he had a degree in classical trumpet. When he left Rare in 2008, he had written some of the most recognizable music of the Nintendo 64 generation. The distance between those two points was not a straight line. It was a series of closed doors and opened ones, of bands that split and studios that hired, of constraints that forced invention. — The light you carry, does it shine brightest when the room is smallest?