Decades into his career,Grant Kirkhopeis still looking for new challenges. When I sat down with the legendary composer at theGame Developers Conferencein San Francisco last month, he noted that 2025 marks his 30th year working in the games industry.
Across those three decades, he’s scored iconic games likeBanjo-Kazooie,GoldenEye 007,Perfect Dark, andViva Pinata(among many others), but he’s always looking to try something different. Currently, “something different” looks like reteaming with Playtonic Games to bring the already stellar Yooka-Laylee soundtrack to fully orchestrated life for the newly reworked rerelease,Yooka-Replaylee.
The Pros And Cons Of Getting Everything You Want
Staking out the middle ground between remake and remaster, the game bringsYooka-Layleeback with updated graphics and a raft of quality-of-life changes designed to address complaints about the original 2017 release. The music wasn’t the subject of much of the criticism leveled at Yooka-Laylee eight years ago, but when opportunity called, Kirkhope answered. So Yooka-Replaylee replaces the original soundtrack, assembled by Kirkhope, David Wise, and Steve Burke from sample libraries, with live instrumentation.
“Any time a composer gets his music played by live people, it’s one of the most amazing things,” Kirkhope says. “That’s the best part of the job… because human beings interpret things, naturally. They get louder and quieter, faster, slower, all that stuff that makes it sound organic. When you sample everything, it can sound a bit sterile sometimes.”
Kirkhope says that Viva Pinata marked the first time a game score he composed was performed with a live orchestra.
As exciting as that is, our conversation often ended up returning to the role those sample libraries played in shaping the sound of Kirkhope’s sound in the ’90s. “People think I’m a really big marimba fan,” Kirkhope says. “I like marimba, but in Banjo-Kazooie I used marimba because it’s a tiny sample and it sounded… great all over the keyboard.”
It’s a reminder that constraints can be a good thing and great artists make the most of what they have. A movie like Clerks, which cost less than $300,000 to make, is still remembered fondly more than three decades later. The Electric State, which Netflix spent more than $300 million on, wasn’t even remembered threeweekslater. Limitations can lead to creative thinking, while unlimited opportunities can lead to malaise. For Kirkhope, those limitations helped him hone a strong grasp of the fundamentals.
Getting Into Tune
“When we were back at Rare back in those days, I feel like all the [composers] I knew around that era… they all knew how to write a tune,” he says. “Because all you had was a decent set of chords and a tune.”
That tune couldn’t just be catchy either; it had to be catchy but not annoying, even on your hundredth time hearing it. It’s a tough needle to thread, and it’s easy to see how now — in an era when someone working at their laptop in their bedroom can make something that sounds gigantic — many composers go for atmosphere over melody. This led to a discussion of how little tune seems to matter in most soundtracks now, and how video games remain a bastion of melody — especially platformers like Yooka-Laylee.
Kirkhope knows a little something about memorable tunes. This is the man whowrote the D.K. Rap, after all.
“Hollywood sounds very bland these days,” Kirkhope says, mentioning the dearth of hummable tunes to come out of theMarvel Cinematic Universepost-The Avengers. “I think that all the scores are very big and massive and all exciting, but they’re very unremarkable. You don’t remember a note of it. When I think back to when I was a kid, coming out of Star Wars or Indiana Jones… you can remember every tune like that, right?”
As Kirkhope succinctly puts it, “human beings like melodies.” A memorable tune played during an impactful scene can imprint itself on your memory like nothing else. Kirkhope says that, at the end of the day, even 30 years into his career, that’s all he’s really looking to leave behind. “For any composer,” he says, “if people remember you for one thing, that is amazing.”
