Game:

Donkey Kong 64 (1999)

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Needless to say, Nintendo’s favorite monkeys had to swing into the bandwagon of 3D collect-a-thon plattformers—more like ‘collect a ton’ due to the exorbitant amount of collectibles included in this game—courtesy of parent company Rare going overboard with the more is more philosophy. This means that, although this was technically a continuation of the Donkey Kong Country series and their characters, the game itself ends up being a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie; all along this was the real Banjo-Threeie long promised that never was.

The project even started with the tentative title Donkey kong Country 4, with development going underway with various members of the Donkey Kong Country team, including DKC 3 composer Eveline Fischer. It was meant to be in a similar obstacle course form to previous entries but then Banjo happened and producers decided to overhaul the project and get it closer to the spirit of explore based plattformers like Mario 64 and the bear and the bird. The main difference, and the way to one up the other mascots, would be the use of five different playable characters, each one with their respective quests and collectibles—and of course signature musical instruments and licks. A few of the Banjo team members entered the fold in order to provide support since they already had experience with a project of that nature and the Nintendo 64 hardware. Amongst them was Grant Kirkhope, who was initially just giving a helping hand since he was already busy with the games Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark but nevertheless ended up taking up the composition work thanks to his experience with the Nintendo 64; so he ended up making music for three N64 games at the same time. Traditional composer of the Donkey Kong series, David Wise, was apparently very busy scoring Dinosaur Planet, the game that ended up becoming Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube.

Like the game itself, the music ends up closer to the spirit of Banjo-Kazooie than to the synthesized atmospheres of the Donkey Kong Country series. This is due in large part to Grant selecting the exact same instrument palette for the two games like his mallets and saxophone plus some of his signatures harmonic movements. There aren’t really many callbacks to previous musical motifs established on the past three games other than a new version of the swinging main theme for the first level. Still, the composer commented that he tried to retain the darker, atmospheric tone that Wise brought to Donkey Kong Country (indeed nothing is darker than the DK Rap). The main difference with Banjo-Kazozie is that here Kirkhope did not rely as much on the tritone or frantic oom-pah rhythms that are still the trademark of the Banjo series.

Nonetheless, the closest that the game might have gotten to the Donkey Kong Country sound would be the more pensive track for the crystalline undergrounds level; just replace the mallets for synth sounds and add more atmospheric percussion. There is a sense of majesty and sacredness in the music as heard in similar purpose tracks like Serenade of Water from Ocarina of Time. This is achieved with the use of the modal mixture of major/minor and the Dorian profiles, with the instruments picked up for their plucky sounds that reflect the crystal, icy ambient. Grant cannot resist the impulse to bring all of his mallet arsenal or some of his most used progressions like the I to bVI movement which is at the center of the ambiguity between Ionian/Major and Aeolian/Minor or the quick succession of transpositions in order to build excitement—the sacredness of the song is also annoyingly disturbed by the giant Kosha that lurks in the highest part of the caves, raining stalactites down on the unsuspecting Kongs.

Music theory analysis and piano cover visualization project made with the actual samples intended for the original Nintendo 64 game. We can now dig inside the score for the first time; offering us a glimpse for how each instrument contributes to the whole. Game Music Theory

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Full Musical Analysis in comments.