Soundtrack reviews: Donkey Kong Country 2

Picture this: it’s the mid-90s, Friday arvo, you’ve just got home from school and you’re getting Maccas for dinner tonight. You boot up the Super Nintendo and the opening fanfare from Donkey Kong Country 2 fills the room. Life’s good.

Soundtracks to games are like soy sauce to dim sims... without it, the whole thing becomes a disgusting mess and all that's left are the wasted remnants of missed potential. Like me. Of course, story lines, interesting characters and game-play mechanics play a huge part too. But when it’s been over 20 years since you’ve played a game and hearing the soundtrack again and transports you right back to when you were a kid, you know they must’ve struck some type of gold. That's why I've decided to start writing a new series of soundtrack reviews.

Let’s start off with the cream of the crop. The OG platform that a lot of us will recognise as our first step into gaming: the Super Nintendo. My first love. Also, the first platform on which the Donkey Kong Country series was released.

As good as the first Donkey Kong Country was, the developers improved upon the first game’s flaws to create the masterpiece that is Donkey Kong Country 2. In retrospect, Donkey Kong might not have the most riveting plot line, or interesting characters (except for you, Cranky Kong), but the soundtrack is just bloody phenomenal. I could delve into the insane amounts of work that went into the 3D rendering of this game, the intricate level design, but that would make this a very long article. So instead, I present to you: Donkey Kong Country 2's soundtrack. The music is one of the main reasons I love this game so damn much. *Chef’s kiss*

Boot up the game and you’re greeted with the iconic K. Rool Returns. Russian composers such as Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky influenced the orchestral sounds we hear, not only in this bold opening track but also throughout the rest of the soundtrack.

David Wise is the man behind the music. He has a wide range of credits under his belt, including Snake Pass, Tengami and Yooka Laylee; but most notable is the Donkey Kong series. Basically, Wise is the Mozart of the gaming soundtrack world. Also, he and the other developers were working from a cattle shed for the development of Donkey Kong Country 2, which I think makes him even more of a rockstar.

The genius of Wise’s compositions is made even more impressive by the fact that the Super Nintendo’s entire system could only accommodate for 64kb of audio RAM. To put this in perspective: that’s about 0.35 seconds of audio if it were CD quality. This 64kb includes the entire soundtrack, sound effects, as well as the code that tells the chip to play the audio too. Suffice to say, musicians had to get creative. Wise didn’t work around the Super Nintendo's constraints: he worked with them. And I think that’s what makes all of his compositions so damn iconic.

The dark and urgent notes of Welcome to Crocodile Isle play as you guide Diddy and Dixie along the map on your search for Donkey Kong – a stark contrast to DKC’s light-hearted, funky Simian Segue that plays on the map screen.

Then we get into the real good shit. Klomp’s Romp is up first.

Suddenly you’re back at your parents’ house, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a bowl of cereal and your huge box TV in front of you. Controller in hand, you watch Diddy and Dixie spawn in this level and at first all you hear is the wind howling in the background, along with the creaks of the rickety old ship you’re on. Then the drums kick in and you’re unleashed into the fucking sick riff that becomes the backbone of the song while you jump up hooks mysteriously dangling from the sky. This is a perfect example of Wise using the limitations that the Super Nintendo offered to his advantage – and what makes this soundtrack such a masterpiece.

I’m skipping over Lockjaw’s Saga, because fuck water levels.

Instead, may I present Jib Jig – probably my favourite level from the game. A pirate-y, windy track which again perfectly encapsulates the feel of the level, complete with the sound of those pesky peg-legged crocs pacing the boardwalk. You’re up in the clouds, jumping across wooden platforms and ascending the ropes swaying in the breeze with nothing but the ambience of this carefully crafted song playing in the background. And, of course, the ‘POINK!’ from the scuttling beetles you crush.

Lo-fi beats show how ahead of his time Wise was. Songs like Stickerbrush Symphony and Aquatic Ambience (from the first title) have become something like cult-like hits among fans. This is the kind of music you hear in those 24 hour ‘study music’ streams on YouTube with the anime chick in the thumbnail.

In fact, suss this hour-and-a-half long video of Donkey Kong music mixed with thunderstorm sounds. The fact that this still holds up in 2020 speaks volumes of Wise’s genius:

So, what was his process? Wise says he would first play the level to get a feel for the rhythm and speed that the song needed to be. He’d listen to music for inspiration and begin composing on his keyboard. Then began the gruelling task of coding it into the game.

As mentioned earlier, there was only a 64kb chip (called the SPC700) for the entirety of every single sound in the game to fit onto. I could write a whole article on this, because it is truly fascinating—albeit very complicated—stuff. But I’ll try and summarise. The SPC700 chip had eight channels. These ‘channels’ are what allows the SNES to play more than one sound at a time. So, eight channels = eight sounds. Musicians weren't given a whole lot to work with. This is where Wise got creative.

“One of the keyboards I was using heavily at the time was a Korg Wavestation and it could synthesize single-cycle waves, move them around and resequence them in different orders so it could effectively simulate filter sweeps. I meticulously sampled many keyboards at different cut-off points to get single-cycle wave samples and by getting into the nitty-gritty of sub-routines, I was able to introduce portamento and filter-sweep into what sounds like a synth line at the very beginning. Those little sounds, that were supposedly impossible to do on a SNES, I was particularly proud of.”

—Wise, interview with Independent.ie, 2017.

Once Wise composed the track on his keyboard, he would record the wave forms at different frequencies, then manually enter the code into a music tracker one by one so that the chip could read it. It took him 5 weeks to program the entirety of Aquatic Ambience into the game. It all paid off in the end though, I reckon.

And thus, the soundtrack was born.

Now to end with, I’m just gonna say it: Snakey Chanty goes harder than ANY song from any other video game soundtrack EVER.

Morphed from DKC’s Gang Plank Galleon—which was inspired by Wise attending Iron Maiden gigs—this track a BOP. I would go so far as to even say it’s the Moonlight Sonata of the 90s. It's better than the entire Spyro trilogy discography combined. Imagine David Wise walking into the CEOs of Rare's office and showing them this track with a smirk on his face, knowing full well he has just created the best track of all time. This song is even better than Donkey Kong Country's Simian Segue. It is fucking LIT.

With that, I will leave you with this terrible video edit I made. Please watch it. I’m a bit technological incompetent and it took me longer to make than I’d care to admit.