The Man Behind the Monkey

Grant Kirkhope is one of the greatest ever composers of video game soundtracks. Some of his most iconic sounds emerged from the smallest, chance decisions.

So often, it’s the smallest creative choices we make that end up having the biggest impact.

One example: Grant Kirkhope was never supposed to be the voice actor for one of the most iconic characters in gaming. But in 1998, a casual choice landed him the role. Kirkhope had joined the Donkey Kong 64 team at Rare. Fresh off the acclaimed soundtracks for other Rare games like GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie, Kirkhope had been tapped to compose the soundtrack for the iconic gorilla’s first 3D adventure.

Previous DK games had featured basic grunts and hooting sounds for the characters, but DK64 would be the first to feature actual spoken dialogue. But who would do the voice acting?

“I asked people at Rare—does anybody want to voice a character?—and no one wanted to do it,” Kirkhope told Push to Talk, “and I got so sick of asking, I said, I’ll just do it myself, and bollocks to it.”

There wasn’t much to the job—quotes include Okay, Hey, Cool, and Ohhhhh Banana—but Kirkhope’s delivery for these simple lines must have resonated with the team at Nintendo. They went on to re-use his recorded samples in over a dozen games over the following decade, including Donkey Konga, Mario Kart: Double Dash, and the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series.

“Nintendo owned half of Rare,” Kirkhope explained. “So when they asked for the samples, of course I sent them. But I never thought they’d really use it.”

Thus thanks to a moment’s decision, Kirkhope became—for over a decade—the de-facto voice of Donkey Kong, one of the only characters in the history of the games industry to remain relevant through both the arcade and modern console eras.

From N64 to the Big Screen

Other small choices made by the Donkey Kong 64 team have resonated far beyond what anyone could have expected. Perhaps none moreso than the decision by the Rare team to include an over-the-top rap music video that played every time players booted up the game.

The “DK Rap” was composed by Kirkhope and written and performed by Rare designer George Andreas, and was intended essentially as a joke. At the time, it struck many critics as a bizarre and ridiculous inclusion in the game, but the song grew a cult fandom, and over time came to be perceived as almost synonymous with the character of Donkey Kong.

With the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, the song’s association with the character was canonized. The DK Rap plays as Donkey Kong’s entrance theme when the character first appears on screen. (Kirkhope says he’s heard that Seth Rogen, who voiced DK in the film, is at least partly responsible for the song’s inclusion.)

Kirkhope was as astonished as anyone when he learned that the song would appear in the film, and that it uses the original recorded sample. “They just took it out of the game and looped it, they didn’t re-record it,” he says. “So in the movie that’s the Banjo team going ‘DK, Donkey Kong.’ A bunch of guys in a crappy little booth in Rare. And they just took it out of the game and put it in the movie.”

Why Kirkhope Still Hasn’t Watched The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Kirkhope went viral in 2023 when he commented publicly about his disappointment that his name wouldn’t appear in the credits for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, despite the film’s inclusion of the DK Rap.

I decided to ask him about it:

PUSH TO TALK: I remember seeing your reaction to the DK rap in The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the fact they didn’t credit you on it. Did that ever come to a happier conclusion?

GRANT KIRKHOPE: So I did contact them about it. When I did the Super Smash Bros. thing,¹ I dealt with them directly. So I had this guy who was my main contact. So I said to him, could you do a bit of digging just under the radar to find out why didn’t they credit me?” And he says, ‘oh yeah, I think you’re going to get an official response.’

So I got a response back from, I guess, one of the legal people. And it said, basically, they came up with this three rule criteria, which was they decided that for any music owned by Nintendo that appeared in the movie, they wouldn’t credit the composer apart from Koji Kondo. Then they decided that anything with a vocal, they would credit the composer. So the Donkey Kong rap score’s there. But then they also decided if Nintendo also owned that, they wouldn’t credit the composer.

So it was sort of this arbitrary thing. And I said, you know… by the time the song credits roll in the movie, it’s right at the very end of the credits, and the theater’s entirely empty. There’s only me and my wife and my kids sat there going, look what I did. You know, for a second, a bit of text, what’s it matter?

Right. It sounds like some of these decisions are being made by the legal department versus the creatives, in any case.

Oh, yeah. Even like having mine and Dave’s musics in Donkey Kong: Bananza, right? We didn’t know until people said hey, guess what, your music’s in there. When Microsoft bought Rare the deal was that all the IP that Rare had created went to Microsoft, but Donkey Kong in its entirety went back to Nintendo. So that was the deal. So they got DK64 back and everything that was in there.

Oh, so to some extent, Microsoft’s purchase of Rare really clarified the rights issue for all that music. It’s just Nintendo’s.

Yeah.

It makes sense, though it must still feel weird for you. At the same time, that scene in the movie when the DK Rap plays is a big celebratory, joyful kind of moment, right?

I tell you what, I still haven’t watched the movie yet. I’ve seen that bit with the rap. But I was so pissed I haven’t watched it.

Chance Encounters

In some ways, most of Kirkhope’s career as a game composer has hinged upon small, chance moments like these. For over a decade before his first games industry job, he was a working musician, playing as many as five nights per week and touring as a trumpet player with bands like Zoot and the Roots and Little Angels. “We ended up doing gigantic tours,” he says, “six weeks with Bon Jovi, six weeks with Van Halen, ZZ Top, Brad Adams. We were playing 90,000 seat arenas outdoors in Europe. It was just that absolute massive rock and roll thing.” That lasted for a few years, he says, “but of course, as it always does with these bands, it all comes to an end and everybody falls out and goes a separate way. So I was like back to playing pub rock in North Yorkshire for £35 a night, you know, playing covers and all that, thinking this is it.”

It was while working pub gigs that Kirkhope’s friend, Robin Beanland, told him about a job he’d gotten doing music for video games at a company called Rare. Beanland recommended some equipment to play around with—”a copy of Cubase, a computer, an Atari ST with a meg of RAM… a meg was a big deal”—and Kirkhope decided to give it a shot. “I sent five cassette tapes off to Rare over the course of 1994,” he says. “For the longest time I never got a reply, but then out of the blue got a letter saying, please come and interview.”

The interviewer was David Wise, the composer behind the acclaimed Donkey Kong Country series. Kirkhope got the gig and has been working primarily on game soundtracks ever since. Kirkhope’s career can be split fairly evenly between the Rare days (1995–2008) and the years since he moved to the United States in 2008 to work on the soundtrack for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Given Kirkhope’s reputation—he is easily one of the most recognizable video game composers outside of Japan—work has been coming steadily. In recent years Kirkhope has landed composer credits on iconic series like Civilization, World of Warcraft, Street Fighter, and Minecraft: Dungeons.

“I feel like I’m in a sweet spot where people that have played the Rare games from the 64-ear are now 30-somethings,” he says. “And they’re all working in games companies, and they go, ‘oh, I remember Grant Kirkhope, let’s hire him. Get that old bloke, he can come and do it.’ So I ended up working on tons of stuff that was unexpected.”

And despite Kirkhope’s mixed feelings about the credits kerfuffle in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, he speaks with pride about the work he still gets to do with Nintendo. Referencing the two Mario + Rabbids games he composed, he says “If you told me in 1995 that I’d get to work on two Mario games, I’d have said you were out of your mind.”

Most striking about Kirkhope’s story is how it demonstrates the impossible-to-calculate upside of diligently making lots of creative work over the course of many years. Everything an artist produces has nearly limitless generative potential that manifests in ways we can’t possibly predict. A chance referral from a musician friend leads to a job on some of the greatest games of the 90s, a rap song written as a joke becomes the de-facto theme for one of the most iconic characters ever, and the pause music for a movie-tie-in video game inspires a hit hip hop song decades later.

None of these events follow necessarily from their precedents. But the compounding magic of thousands of small creative choices gradually led to all of these unexpected outcomes, including Kirkhope’s status as one of the most celebrated game composers working today. Even the smallest creative choices can be life-changing.

Next year will mark 30 years since Kirkhope’s first credited game soundtrack. So I asked him: How long does you plan to keep on going?

“Forever,” he says. “I’m gonna be writing the last note as they put the lid on my coffin.”

That’s it for this week, and for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading Push to Talk. I’ve loved writing it for you.

1. Kirkhope arranged and composed music for the Banjo-Kazoooie DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate