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Former RARE composer Grant Kirkhope on how he got started in the industry

by rawmeatcowboy
10 September 2012
GN Version 4.0
A portion of a Nintendo Nation interview with Grant Kirkhope...

Nintendo Nation – How did you first get involved with creating music for games?

Grant Kirkhope – I’d been playing in lots of dodgy rock bands etc. for years, I went to University and studied a music degree, very close to you guys in Manchester, and then I spent ten years on and off the dole, unemployed, playing in bands and doing lots of different bits and pieces. All through this I had a friend, Robin Beanland – we’d played in bands together and we were good friends – and he got the gig at Rare and I was like ‘oh wow, that’s cool, what a great job’ and after about a year he said to me – because, well, my bands weren’t doing very well – ‘why don’t you try and do what I do?’ So I said ‘well what do I need to do?’ And he recommended me buying an Atari ST computer with a meg of RAM – which was pretty special in those days -and a copy of Cubase, and I got an E proteus FX synthesiser as well. Then I just sat in my bedroom in my mum’s house and tried to write some tunes, really, in a game-y style.

I mean I already liked playing games so it was great fun to do, and then I sent five cassette tapes to Rare over the course of about a year, and never heard a single reply, and then out of the blue I got a reply saying ‘please come for an interview, and could you bring with you a tune you’ve written, I think it was a fighting game tune, a Mario type platformer game, and something else. I always forget the third one. So I kind of madly wrote some tunes, went to my local studio – Blue Stripe studios in Harrogate – and then brought the tunes with me and went down for the interview. I sat in a room with Simon Farmer who was the general manager there, composer David Wise who, of course, is famous for Donkey Kong etc. and they listened to the tunes, asked me a couple of questions and sort of said ‘alright, thanks. Off you go’. So I went home and just thought ‘oh well, I wonder…’

Then that Friday I got the letter saying I’d got the job. I was completely stunned really and started October 15th 1995.

Full interview here