David Wise was the composer for Donkey Kong Country, though he didn’t know it at first. Working as a freelance musician who had previously scored nearly a decade’s worth of Rare-developed titles such as Wizards & Warriors and Battletoads, Mr. Wise composed three demo tracks for the new Donkey Kong game, fully expecting that someone from Nintendo of Japan would eventually take over. Donkey Kong was far too important, right? However, not only did he keep the gig, composing some of the most memorable game music of all time in the process, but his work secured a full-time position at Rare where he stayed for 15 more years. And those three demo tracks? They were combined to become “DK Island Swing,” the first level’s theme.
The Donkey Kong Country soundtrack, co-composed with Eveline Novakovic, drew inspirations from Koji Kondo’s work on Mario and Zelda, the 1993 Super NES game Plok, as well as synthesized film scores and rock and dance music from the early ’80s. Each level’s theme is designed to evoke not only the environment itself, but also to complement the gameplay happening on-screen. Mr. Wise attributed the high quality of the soundtrack in large part to the revolutionary compression techniques that the team at Rare labored over.
Donkey Kong Country’s felicitous musical accompaniment would come to define the series just as much as its exceptional gameplay and incredible graphics.
