Grant Kirkhope looks back on his GoldenEye soundtrack

Coming from Grant Kirkhope...

“We had bought a double CD of the pop songs from all the Bond movies. I listened to that all the time. I picked up bits that got stuck in my head, you know, so I just like, put in the things I liked and hoped for the best! I was new at Rare, I didn’t really know what I was doing. In Frigate, I used my version of the “We Care A Lot” drum beat. I love Faith No More, so I nicked that. And then I took a bit from A View To A Kill, put that in there, and Goldfinger. For Cradle (another GoldenEye track), the riff was from one of the bands I was in years ago. It’s called "No Absolution". I was like, ‘It would sound cool if I stuck it in GoldenEye,’ so...”

That was me playing guitar (in the main theme). Memory was so tiny on an 8-megabit N64 cartridge. So, it worked out that the actual Bond theme tune, you could play it from about three phrases. So we cut it, because if we did it as one long phrase, then we couldn’t fit it in the memory. So we cut it into bits, and rearranged it a little bit, so we could play all of it with only two or three samples.”

This is just a small snippet of a feature where Mr. Kirkhope looks back on his game composing career. Check out the interview here!